I used to live in Switzerland and we had a nice and portable outdoor BBQ that runs on wood charcoal. To start it, we used this product:
It's basically a burnable paste, similar in viscosity to honey. It's mainly burning alcohol.
We moved to North America and I am looking for a similar product, but I don't seem to find anything close to this. Do you have any suggestion? Basically I think that I could probably just use lighter fuel or alcohol but I liked the high viscosity, much safer.
I'm not in the US, and product names differ, but I've seen it called BBQ lighting gel, among other things but almost always gel. Small tubes may be found as priming paste/gel for petrol stoves - that's the only time I've seen "paste" used in English for this sort of thing.
If you can find 90% alcohol hand sanitiser, you can use that; it's also gelled alcohol, but much lower concentrations have too much water to be good for burning (most will ignite but soon burn down to a puddle of mainly water).
The advantage of gel over ordinary denatured alcohol is mainly that it doesn't flow and so concentrates the heat where you put it. It may also use a greater proportion of isopropanol, which burns with a more visible flame than ethanol or methanol - and that's good for safety. Otherwise the gel isn't inherently safer, and you still don't want to be adding more to something burning.
You can gel alcohol yourself, but I've never tried it. The key ingredient is calcium acetate, which can be made from eggshells and vinegar. A little water is needed in the mix.
Just to get your carcoal BBQ oven started, you can also use lamp oil or pure burning alcohol.
The main advantage of Sicherheitsbrennpaste (which is basically gelated burning alcohol) over normal burning alcohol is that it's less likely to explode when used incorrectly (hence the name "Sicherheitsbrennpaste" = "safety burning gel"). According to Wikipedia, Sicherheitsbrennpaste is marketed as "Sterno" in the US.
With lamp oil and burning alcohol, you need to make sure to never pour it over already burning or hot items as the fire might crawl back into the bottle and cause an explosion. With Sicherheitsbrennpaste this is less likely to happen, because it does not vaporate to explosive concentrations.
Both, Sicherheitsbrennpaste as well as ordinary Brennsprit (burning alcohol) is also used directly for cooking in specific burners. But they must be of the matching type. The one for Sterno is just an empty pot, the one for burning alcohol contains some kind of heat-resistant sponge.
I have never visited the Americas; the following is an idea instead of an answer.
This product fulfills the same application:
Solid cubes that catch fire after being touched with a lighter and burn for a couple of minutes. The chemical formula seems to be (CH2)6N4. Btw it's called 'dry alcohol' in my language.
