Dex Harlow

The first three batches were either underburned or turned to ash. By batch seven I had something worth selling.

I spent most of my twenties cooking over whatever charcoal was on sale at the hardware store. Kingsford, Royal Oak, the generic store brand in the paper bag. I knew the food tasted better over wood fire, but I assumed that was just the romance of it, not something you could actually engineer. Then in the fall of 2015, a friend named Ruben Castillo who runs a small ranch outside Mountainair brought me a garbage bag full of charcoal he had made himself in a pit behind his barn. I cooked a rack of ribs over it that evening and the difference was not subtle. The smoke was cleaner, the heat was steadier, and the ash was almost nothing. I started asking questions.

Ruben had learned the earthen-kiln method from his grandfather, who had made charcoal for a living in Chihuahua before crossing the border in the 1960s. The technique is old, slow, and not particularly efficient by industrial standards. You build a mound of hardwood, cover it with dirt and green brush to restrict oxygen, light it from the bottom, and tend it for three to five days while it carbonizes. You lose maybe 70 percent of the wood weight in the process. What is left is dense, clean, and burns at temperatures that briquettes simply cannot reach. I spent most of 2016 learning the method from Ruben, burning small batches on a patch of land I was renting near Edgewood, making every mistake you can make. The first three batches were either underburned or turned to ash. By batch seven I had something worth selling.

Dex Harlow grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and spent his early career cooking in restaurant kitchens in Albuquerque, including four years as a line cook at a wood-fired grill restaurant on Central Avenue that no longer exists. He left the industry in 2014 to figure out what came next, and spent a year doing odd jobs and cooking obsessively at home. The encounter with Ruben Castillo's homemade charcoal in 2015 redirected everything. He spent 2016 learning the earthen-kiln method and launched Canyon Charcoal at the Edgewood Farmers Market in spring 2017. He lives in Edgewood with two dogs and a wood-fired oven he built in his backyard from a kit he bought in Portugal. He is currently working on a small guide to cooking over lump charcoal for people who have only ever used a gas grill. He reads a lot of food history.