Caveman cooking is the process of cooking items directly on coals.
I caveman cooked a ribeye, and I may never cook a steak any other way again, it was absolutely incredible.
But before I regress my cooking style, is caveman cooking safe?
Not necessarily from a food safety point of view, more like is it safe to ingest charcoal powder and the like.
Regular kingsford coal, no lighter fluid used to ignite it.
They give you charcoal drink if you swallowed poison. I don’t think charcoal will kill you. IMO
That’s what I thought too. I imagine kingsford is probably “food grade”
One site said charcoal might act as a laxative. Maybe that’s why cavemen quit cooking directly on the coals.
They developed that 2 forked sticks and a stick spanning over the fire. Skewered the meat and hung it up to cook.
Rotisserie
I think that you are probably better off using lump charcoal rather than premade briquettes.
Not exactly the same thing, but there’s a big ol’ cave/tourist attraction in northern Alabama that was inhabited 8,000 years ago and the park rangers demonstrate how the "cavemen’ cooked their food: they dug a moderate sized hole in the ground, lined it with an animal skin, filled the hole with water and heated rocks in a near-by fire and dropped the rocks into the water which cooked the food. The rangers joked(?) this was their lunch every day. They also demonstrated spear throwing with an atlatl and even at age 9, I could tell a difference in mechanical advantage. Until I speared my brother in the butt. Strictly accidental.
Activated charcoal, even lump charcoal. is NOT the same as charcoal briquettes, such as Kingsford. The latter also contains anthracite coal, limestone, sodium nitrate, borax, and more. If “quick starting” it has petroleum distillates added too. It is not meant to be eaten.
I have no idea how harmful the amount that would get on the meat would be though.
Probably best to use natural lump charcoal if you are going to do this.
Mind you all foods cooked over even wood smoke has some risk compared to just grilled due to the particles of the smoke getting in the food with fairly large amounts of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH). I’d WAG that cooking on the coals increases that deposition as well, but do not know that as fact. But this is not every day eating …
Purportedly, a large component of cooking in the 18th century was trying to keep the flavor of soot and smoke out of the food.
When you’re going to get smoke and soot into all of your cooked food, every single meal, for your entire life, something which isn’t smokey seems more delicious just because it’s different.
In modern day, we can actually choose between different styles of meal - everything from sous-vide to caveman - because we have enough control over our environment to be able to do wherever the hell we want. For us, switching around between all variants makes sense since it’s all just as available no matter what.
When you have no choice and your meal is going to have a smokey flavor every day of your life, no matter what you do, I could see a steady and consistent move away from the smokey flavor. More smokey just isn’t a direction you would want to go, not even for variety.
From everything I am aware of about human history through the civilized era, smoke was a regular component of your food and air on a constant basis. If you could stand next to someone from the 17th century, they would probably smell to you like the inside of a fireplace.
While, granted, I wouldn’t recommend taking up smoking, I think it’s reasonable to think that humans are sufficiently immune to smoke that unless you take up a job cooking over a fire, every day, professionally - your body will heal over any damage you do it to through a brief period of second hand smoke inhalation every few days of plain, untreated wood.
As it is, even when smoking two packs a day, people still only take a few years off their lives. My expectation of that sort of activity would be that you’d keel over after a few years of smoking cigarettes, and yet it doesn’t. As said, we seem to be pretty resistant.
IANAD.
Keep in mind–the cavemen are all…dead.
Alton did this once on Good Eats for quickly grilling thin cuts of steak. Lump charcoal and used a hair dryer to blow ash off of the surface of the top coals and to “goose” the heat level a bit.
Charcoal briquets have all kinds of nasty binders and stuff in them, as mentioned above. I waffle between the convenience of briquets and the cleaner cook of lump charcoal even without dropping my food in the coals. If you want to keep doing that, is strongly recommend cooking with lump charcoal or with wood. (Just don’t use pressure-treated wood for cooking.)
Personally I have no problem with some BBQ , smoked, or in the cooked in the coals meat here and there. But NO, it is not reasonable to think that since humans did something for many thousands of years we are therefor immune to damage from it.
A charred in the coals steak or so gonna make you keel over on the spot? Duh no. But more significant risks from regular contact than say, from those household sponges that so many here apparently try to sterilize on a regular basis? Oh yeah.
First the hijack. Feel free to skip but the claim of we’ve done it this way forever so it must be okay bit. Exposure to smoke itself. An occasional campfire or grilling outside indeed is very very little risk, but many across the world, more than half, do indeed live like many have for a long time, using biofuels like wood indoors with inadequate ventilation. It isone of the world’s ten major causes of death and disease. Specifically “[c]hildren and women are disproportionately affected, with nearly 800 000 deaths attributable to indoor air pollution occurring among children under five years of age and more than 500 000 such deaths occurring among women.” No they are not immune because it has been fairly constant.
This is not that.
This is more in the broader category of the risk associated with intake of processed, cured, and smoked meats in general, increasing the risk of cancers (specifically colon, stomach, and breast), the risk of heart disease and stroke, and even the risk of diabetes.
My WAG would be that the several times a grilling season steak cooked in the (natural lump) coals is less risk than a daily sandwich made with highly processed meats (which is estimated to be an 18% increased risk of colon cancer alone).
And that it seems highly likely that the method increases exposure to the things of smoked and grilled meats that are associated with increased health risks.
The op though asks if it is safe. That is a relative thing. There is some risk compared to say eating the same cut of meat cooked sous vide.
How big is that risk? Probably not huge over having the same steak cooked over the open flame. Is the risk worth it? That is a separate question and one that each person decides for themselves. It is more than the risk of disease from using a sponge that was left in the sink (so long as that sponge was not used to wipe up stuff like raw chicken) but small enough that I’d certainly eat it as a once in a while thing if it really tastes good. With no hesitation at all.
But I’d ditch the Kingsford.
I presume that India would be a primary example for this. Their under 5 child morality rate is 39.5 deaths per 1000 children born.
In history, the child mortality rate was something like 280 deaths per 1000, so we’re certainly doing something better today even if smoke is still an issue. But let’s see what percentage of that is attributable to smoke inhalation since whole numbers are generally misleading and I naturally distrust anyone who uses them rather than per capital or percentile or whatever.
It looks like about 9.32% of the population of India is under 5.
Presuming that countries which burn wood indoors have relatively similar demographics to India, if 3.2 billion people are still burning stuff indoors then we would expect there to be about 298m children under the age of 5 in those homes. Presuming, similarly, that the Indian child mortality rate would be similar to other countries where burning stuff indoors is still common, we would expect about 11.8m deaths.
Your cite says that regular contact with smoke causes about 800,000 deaths. That’s about 6.7% of deaths.
Judging by this graphic:
https://www.who.int/gho/child_health/mortality/causes/en/
It does look like acute respiratory infection is the largest size of the pie, post-birth (at least, I think that’s what the orange section is - I can’t see what the colors mean on my phone, the label is too small and don’t show in the close-up).
Though this still is 6.7% of 39.5 of 1000, so the total number of children killed is 0.27%.
Pretty high. I would try to not live in a wood-burning home. But my expectation would be that 10% of children under the age of 5 would die from the sheer quantity of smoke inhalation. We are pretty resistant compared to what my expectation would be. And my assumption would be that we do have a large number of adaptations to deal with this specific form of poisoning, which we have built up over the last few hundred thousand years.
Sorry but whatever point you think you are making is completely incoherent. No idea why you’d have the expectations you claim to have and why you think your expectations are of any significance. Breathing in smoke is harmful and is exposure best kept limited. No not 100% fatal at any level.
Humans have been exposed to smoke … forever … and even living near wildfires still causes short and longterm adverse health outcomes. We have not become “immune” to it.
Which is again a hijack that doesn’t have any bearing on this op, the ingestion of burnt wood (likely harmless but in this case with additives, including anthracite coal ash, which contains lead mercury arsenic and cadmium) and meat smoked and charred by it.
Caveman NOT cooking safe, caveman cooking MEAT! Safe too tough to chew, even for caveman! Ugh!
I just want to point out that cooking a caveman is perfectly safe, once you have thoroughly subdued and incapacitated him. It would be the most humane thing to kill him before cooking though.
Far as cooking by direct application of hot coals, I wouldn’t use charcoal, not briquettes certainly. Too much icky as pointed out. I’d go with raw wood coals myself.
Could we kill him by making him ingest charcoal powder?
Would it be the utmost heresy to put a sheet of aluminum foil on the coals and put the meat on that? If you’re concerned about toxic stuff, that would keep more of it out than putting it directly on the coals.
Charcoal burns hot enough to quickly melt aluminum foil.
This is what I’m wondering. What’s the advantage of putting it directly on the coals? If it’s a char you want, in my opinion, there are better ways to go about it than directly on the coals.
A cast iron pan (on your grill) will give you more surface char while still getting the smoky goodness of the coals.