If you love BBQ foods, you must have faced the situation of using fuel while barbecuing? Wood pellets and wood chips are the two main options with which all barbecue lovers confront. To enjoy Versatility in the line of spicy and juicy BBQ food sat some steps, you need to decide which one to use after comparing Wood Pellets vs Wood Chips.
To help you enjoy the best, we, after many observations, intended to draw a comparison of Wood pellets vs. wood chips. After skimming through this wood pellet reviews you can finalize that can you use wood pellets instead of wood chips.
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Step by Step Guidelines: Wood Pellets vs Wood Chips
Both smoking chips and pellets have their uses. Both release flavorful smoke to make your dishes sweet and mouthwatering. Our comparison wood pellets vs wood chips will make the situation clearer.
What are Wood Pellets?
The small pellets sized and shaped pieces of wood and organic matter. When the United States faced a shortage of oil, this situation forced it to search for an alternative to oil for the stove.
Soon after that, the pellet stove appeared on the face of the earth. After some time, United States solved the shortage problem of oil, but there grew a trend of using pellet stoves. People made used the pellet stoves to cook delicious food full of original smoky flavor.
Moreover, with wood pellets in the stove, using wood pellets in smokers and grills grew. The difference was only that of the structure of wood pellets for grills and smokers, and stoves. One can use both hardwood and softwood in stoves, but only the hardwood pellets are used in the smoker and grill.
The size of wood pellets used in the smoker and grill is small. But the small size does not mean you need a huge collection to burn them in the smoker or grill. Thanks to the latest technology, the burning quantity of wood pellets are controlled by the device to ensure mouthwatering food. In electric smoker mostly wood pellets are used that’s because they are termed as electric Wood pellets.
Furthermore, the size of the hopper and the type of dish also maintain the consumed quantity of wood pellets. The balance between the type of smoked food and the number of wood pellets plays an essential role in smoking delicious food. Wood Pellets take pride in smoking flavorful food because they are free from any additives that can affect the taste of your food.
To add this, wood pellets are usable in both smokers and grills. When you look at BBQ pellets vs propane ,BBQ Pellets are the winner. These are best for both cold smoking and hot smoking. But our experts and observation prove that they are best to use with smokers for smoking meat. Wood chips or pellets for electric smoker and only pellets for pellet smoker are used.
What are wood chips?
Wood chips are smaller and thinner pieces of hardwood. They are harvested from hardwood trees like oak, hickory, and cherry as the hardwood tree is cut that is shaped into 2-4 inches smoking chunks. This hardwood tree can be of Maple, Oak, Cherry, Hickory, and Apple. The dried cooking chunks are the best as they provide a strong taste and flavor.
However, wood chips are mostly used with hard lumps of charcoal. Charcoal is the main source of providing heat, and wood chips add flavor to the food. When you add these chunks when you intend to smoke food, you can get the taste of meat according to the type of chunks as apple, maple, hickory, cherry. Wood chips will quickly burn to ash and become useless so, and our experts recommend you to use smoking chunks for better flavor.
Advantages of Wood Pellets
Using wood pellets has several benefits. Wood pellets for BBQ smokers are preferred. Some smokers like pellet smokers and grills are specially designed for using wood pellets for smoking food purposes. These smokers have hopper designed with them. The size of the hopper maintains the number of wood pellets.
If you have the wood pellet smoker and grill, you are advised to stick to the wood pellets. Because these types of smokers are designed to use only a limited amount of wood pellets through the system to add flavor to your food. Pellet smokers provide you set and forget the food smoking experience without the tension of balancing heat level and ensuring your food has full taste and flavor.
To add this, wood pellets are easily available in large quantities. You can get them from not only local grocery stores and from online through our Amazon links. When you smoke food, after purchasing the bag of wood pellets, toss them in the hopper according to the need for your dish and hopper capacity. Above all, you can get the advantage of using the wood pellets only if you have a smoker especially designed for using pellets.
In addition to this, wood pellets are easy to store as they take less space to put. They are easy to transport from one place to another place. Moreover, they are easy to transmit, especially through long pipes. They usually are storable in bags and automatically and manually fed to the pellet burner.
Advantages of wood chips
Wood chips are cheaper than wood pellets because they can be prepared after a few steps than making wood pellets.
Buying wood chips affect positively on the local economy. Because the forest landowners can manage the wood chips production as they want.
What to Select Wood Pellets or Wood Chips?
To decide which one to select, you need to consider the design of the burning system, the specification of the boiler, and storage condition. Some types of boilers can go with both wood pellets or wood chips.
But some of the boilers are specially designed for using wood pellets. The name of the pellet smoker can be mentioned in this respect. Their narrow device is designed especially for wood pellets. They are not perfect for wood chips.
Do you also need to consider how to transport the fuel? Moreover, if you have a small space to store the fuel, you must go for the wood pellets as they occupy the small space. If you have limited room for this, then too buying wood pellets is the best option.
Furthermore, your delivery charges also maintain the type of fuel. The larger the delivery capacity, the lower the unit of fuel. On the contrary, if you buy a larger quantity of wood chips, the volume and freight are heavy than wood pellets.
Additionally, the delivery of wood chips needs some extra effort as compared to that of wood pellets. Wood pellets are transported in bulk quantities through the long pipes, and due to fluidity, they are transmitted easily. On the other hand, wood chips lack fluidity and need lift trailers and containers to support them due to less fluidity.
Editor’s Note
Both wood pellets and wood chips are used for smoking delicious meat. You need to buy wood pellets if you have a pellet smoker or pellet grill. Because they are special to use wood pellets as fuel, if you want convenience, comfort, set, and forget smoking food experience using pellet smoker, you must buy wood pellets.
Moreover, if you are smoking food using the traditional smoker and want the authentic smoky flavor, our experts recommend you stick to the smoking chunks. Smoking chunks provide you an authentic smoking experience. The high-quality smoking chunks will make your food flavorful, keeping it at the right heat level.
