Making Bamboo Charcoal

I've been reading about the amazing benefits of bamboo charcoal. It seems that turning bamboo into charcoal gives bamboo a new set of useful properties that until recently I was entirely unaware of. Bamboo charcoal has a high porosity that makes it good to suck out the excess humidity from the air as well as unpleasant odors. I'm sensitive to chemicals and so I don't use air fresheners. As an alternative, I thought I'd try and make my own bamboo charcoal. I bought some bamboo chopsticks from a shop in town along with some aluminum foil and then went back home.

I wasn't sure how it was going to work out as I had never made any type of charcoal before, let alone bamboo charcoal. As with everything today, I googled the topic and found a useful site (www.pyroenergen.com) on how to do it.

I wrapped a pair of bamboo chopsticks in aluminum foil and left the ends slightly open to allow gas to escape. I then took my grill mesh and put it on top of the gas stove and placed the aluminum package on the grill mesh. At first I heated slowly. I soon noticed a gas coming off. It looked yellow and smelt slightly acidic. I guess that was the bamboo vinegar escaping.

As suggested, I waited a few minutes and then turned up the gas to full. After about 40 minutes of strong heat the gas coming off became whitish. At that point I turned off the gas and used chopsticks to pick up the hot aluminum package and place it in a bowl of water.

Once the package was cooled, I unwrapped the aluminum foil package and looked inside. The bamboo chopsticks had indeed become black and looked like charcoal. I tried to pick up the thin pieces of bamboo charcoal but they snapped. They were fairly brittle. A good sign was that my hands didn't get dirty from handling the bamboo charcoal.

I thought not bad for my first effort. However, the trick is to make a bigger batch of bamboo charcoal like these to men in the picture on the left. The picture is taken in Ise, incidentally the home of Japan's most sacred shrine.

I think I might just buy bamboo charcoal next time and leave it in my kitchen and fridge to help make the air smell fresh as my apartment is small and cooking smells etc. soon permeate the whole place.

I'm also quite interested in cooking with bamboo charcoal. Apparently, you can it add to rice in the rice cooker and it takes the chlorine and other chemicals out of the water to make better tasting rice.

I'm no chef, but I also like the look of these bamboo charcoal swiss cakes on the left. Although bamboo charcoal has no taste or aroma it is meant to improve the taste of food. I also like the black colour. It looks very striking.