Anyone ever made their own wood?

[frazier]

I'm talkin about those toasted oak cubes some recipes call for.

Here in our corner of the woods, we've got lots of black cherry and choke cherry trees. These are weeds, not orchard-type trees. When I take the occasional tree out, I happily use the wood to smoke up my barbeque - gives great flavor to steaks and salmon. The wood has a faint but definite cherry aroma to it.

Now I wonder about slicing and dicing, and ... what? How best to treat the wood so as to add it to a secondary for, say, a cherry wheat, or something.

So, anybody ever tried this? How long to dry, or bake, or whatever.

 

[frazier]

OK, so no one has made their own. Sometime this spring, I'll cut up some cherry logs and make a bunch of 1/2" cubes. I'll probably leave them raw, since the cherry aromatics might be stronger that way. I'll have to decide on what batch might benefit from "cherry-wood aging."

We'll see how it turns out.

 

[samc]

some interesting reading for you http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cach...eer&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

 

[frazier]

Hey thanks, that's good info.