[Terrapreta] torrefied wood or charcoal?

[Gerald Van Koeverden]

true or false?

Charcoal
by: E. G. Kingsford


Charcoal is simply carefully cooked wood.
Mankind figured out this one many centuries ago. The heat-producing  
part of fuel is carbon. Increase the relative amount of carbon in  
your cooker, and you can roast that haunch of mountain goat, or yak  
fillet, and get out of the kitchen in half the time. Wood is about  
50% carbon (coal is 90). You can up your wood-based carbon by  
reducing the wood’s hydrogen and oxygen content. It’s still done  
pretty much the way it was started centuries ago. Logs are baked  
slowly at very high temperatures in a low-oxygen oven. This drives  
off most of the liquids and leaves the carbon.

Unlike charcoal, the irritating, ubiquitous charcoal briquette is  
made from roasted wood scrap, quick-lighting chemicals, and binders  
compressed into a little cake. It has less snob appeal than true  
charcoal but is a thoroughly American heritage. The briquette was  
invented in the 1920s for Henry Ford, as an auto assembly line  
spinoff. Henry Ford pondered the problem of how to squeeze a buck  
from the scraps of steering wheel and dashboard wood that were  
ordinarily thrown away. As always, his crack staff answered with the  
solution, “Cook it, smash it into a lump, and give it a fancy name.”  
For years thereafter you could only buy charcoal briquettes only at  
your local Ford dealerships. Then, eventually the operation became so  
large it was turned over to a Ford relative, E.G. Kingsford, and the  
rest is hamburger.

http://www.dountoothers.org/charcoal.html
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