Est. 1998 — 27 years of woodworking knowledge
Cedar for cooking
Alex Y
I keep choking on the cost of cedar planks sold for cooking. Any reason not to buy fence pickets at the Borg, cut them to size and hit them with a sander or plane to give a smoother surface? I don't see anything indicating that these cedar fencing boards have any chemical treatment, which of course would kill this idea.
I resawed some cedar 2x6 scraps one time, the salmon was delicious, and I lived to tell about it, but don't want to push my luck.
Re: Cedar for cooking
John K Jordan
What kind of cedar is used for cooking? If you can use eastern red cedar and live near I can give you a truck load of 1" boards from my sawmill. When the clear sections are too small for useful lumber I throw them into a pile to burn.
experiment
Bill Tindall, E.Tn.
cook it on maple (or any other wood) and see if you can tell the difference. I'll bet not. The reason cedar is used may be because ash doesn't grow there, or cherry, oak, etc.
Re: Cedar for cooking
Keith Newton
Alex, I'm pretty sure that both shingle and fence pickets are Western red cedar (Thuja plicata) so your idea should be fine.
However, I have used Eastern Redcedar, (Juniperus Virginia) and love the combined aroma it produced.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I might just try that again this weekend.
Re: Cedar for cooking
Rum
I'm still using the off-cuts from a fence I put in with Western Red Cedar about 10 years ago. Still delicious 
Re: Cedar for cooking
CJ in MPLS
I have always found that I pay more for the non-food safe additives in my wood. If your deck boards are sold as plain cedar, they probably are just cedar.
On the other hand, I think Instructables needs a DIY article on shining a broadband LED flashlight through smoke from the cedar under test such that the light is incident upon a Cheap Trick CD that acts as the grating of a spectrometer to generate spectrographs of your smoke on a sheet of white paper. The difficult thing will be to figure out how to use your iPhone to capture an image of the spectrographs and run a Fourier analysis in a timely fashion. Anybody know the spectral fingerprints of the more common wood treatment chemicals?
Re: Cedar for cooking
Mark Mandell - Gone Round In New Jersey
Been using resawn scraps from my house siding (Eastern White Cedar) for years. It doesn't have quite as much aroma as the red, so the flavor's more subtle. I've also tried Mesquite, Cherry, and Apple, but they do far better as smoker fuel. Those hardwoods have added little or nothing as "planking" stock.
Re: Cedar for cooking
John K Jordan
>>>Anybody know the spectral fingerprints of the more common wood treatment chemicals?
Yes, it's 42.
Re: Cedar for cooking
Joe shelton
That's the most trenchant response I've seen, and wish it were mine!
Re: Cedar for cooking
Mark
Short Answer is there is no reason you cant but cedar at the BB stores and use it. Been doing it for years. I guess the other question( at least for me ) is why? I really cant tell the diff. between a Salmon Filet cooked on a cedar plank versus one on the BBQ without. Thats just me though.