Which wood for the braai and the fireplace?

Rooikrans is what most braais at the Cape run on, for a practical reason: after roughly 40 minutes you have coals hot enough for wors and chops. They do not last forever, though — perfect for a 45-to-60-minute braai, wrong for a three-hour potjie.

The acacia originally comes from Australia and has spread along the coast to the point of crowding out indigenous fynbos. Burning rooikrans is, in that sense, conservation work with dinner as a side effect.

Sekelbos is traded less as fuel than as flavour. The wood dries down in the bushveld sun to far below the mark at which firewood counts as seasoned — merchants advertise one to three percent, which is lower than air-dried wood can actually hold, but the direction is right. On top of that it carries aromatic oils that release a distinctly sweet smoke as it burns.

That makes it the opposite of a neutral wood. Sear a steak quickly and you will barely notice. Keep poultry or pork belly over the coals for longer and the difference is obvious.

Kameeldoring is the benchmark other firewood is measured against: dense, heavy, near bone-dry, with a flame that stands still and coals that carry for hours. In a fireplace that means loading once instead of feeding constantly, and barely any smoke in the room.

The catch is legal. The tree grows extremely slowly and is listed as a protected species under South Africa's National Forests Act. Cutting living trees without a permit is an offence. What is legally on the market almost always comes from Namibia, where camel thorn is farmed for the purpose, or from demonstrably dead trees.

Black wattle is the workhorse. It is softer than rooikrans or kameeldoring, so it catches faster and lights a fire well — yet it holds a surprisingly long, even bed of coals and gives meat a pronounced smoky note.

This acacia is introduced too and counts as invasive in South Africa because it draws enormous amounts of water along riverbanks. Burning it is as uncontroversial as burning rooikrans.

Kaggelhout is simply Afrikaans for fireplace wood and names no species. The bag usually holds blue gum, black wattle, red gum, beefwood and Port Jackson — all of it from the clearing of invasive stands, cut denser and drier than braai wood.

That is why the split between braai wood and fireplace wood is visible on the shelf at all: two different bags with two different labels, and one is not the other.

The catch: "semi-seasoned" means part-dried at most merchants, not bone-dry. A bag that has stood two weeks under cover burns noticeably better than one straight off the delivery.

Pine is a softwood with a high resin content. It catches immediately, burns hot and is gone in twenty minutes, leaving hardly any coals. For a braai that means you can light with it but not cook on it.

On the fireplace question a correction is due. The common story is that the resin deposits creosote in the flue. The research says otherwise: creosote comes mainly from **cool burning and wet wood**, not from the species. Dry pine burnt hot deposits no more than dry hardwood.

It is still listed here as unsuitable, for two practical reasons. It burns down so fast that you refuel every twenty minutes — and constant refuelling never lets the flue settle at a proper temperature. And it spits. In an open fireplace that is not a theoretical concern.