We’ve been toying with the idea of getting a smoker for a while, now that we’re retired and have time for these things. Also, we are buying cow fractions from a neighbor who raises beef cattle; last time we purchased, she deliberately gave us a brisket that she said was ideal for use in a smoker.
All recommendations regarding what type of smoker to get, what meat we should smoke, recipes, things to look out for, or anything else, are welcome.
In particular: can we get rid of our Weber grills, or should we keep one?
ETA: Wirecutter recommends Camp Chef Woodwind Pro. Do you agree?
I have a Pit Boss vertical smoker that I’m happy with. I can control it from my cell phone, and it’s easy to clean. Smoker recipes are easy to come by online, but since different model smokers behave differently you’re have to experiment a little, which is part of the fun. Keep in mind that it can take hours to smoke a piece of meat, but it’s always worth the wait.
I have a Weber Smoky Mountain, which is a vertical, or bullet-style smoker, which I’ve been very happy with. But if you plan to do a lot of whole briskets, a rectangular model like a Camp Chef Woodwind Pro may be best.
I also have a Pit Boss vertical, but it’s not so fancy I can control it with my cellphone - I’m jealous! I’ve found mine to be really easy to use - it dials the temperature in to 25° increments and maintains temperature without having to babysit it.
You need to decide on a budget as well as the type of smoker you want first, then you can consider specific models. I have a camp chef pellet smoker, and it is very, very easy to get consistent temperature and smoke on that. Offset smokers produce the best “smoky” flavor, but they require constant attention. If you are doing a 12 hour brisket, you may not want that. So, yes, the camp chef woodwind pro will give you very good, but not professional, results, with the least effort.
We just bought a RecTeq Deck Boss 800 which set us back about $850 (it was on sale). It’s a pellet smoker. This is my third smoker. I had an electric smoker that conked out on me around 2018 or 19 that I never replaced and I still have a wood smoker in my shed. I guess what are the advantages?
The electric smoker is pretty much a set-it-and-forget it type of setup. It’s got an electric heating element and a place to set wood into it which is what makes it a smoker. Other than replacing the woodchips you don’t really have to babysit an electric smoker.
Wood smoker. This is the classic of course and ours works just fine. This one requires some babysitting. i.e. You really can’t just walk away for two or three hours as you want to make sure the temperature is steady. You’ve also got to keep a good amount of wood around.
Pellet Smoker. This burns little wood pellets. Ours has an automatic hopper which feeds the fire so it’s convenient and makes regulating the temperature a little easier. You don’t need to babysit it as much as a wood smoker, but you still can’t walk away for hours at a time.
And as others have said, keep your Weber grill because it’s a different tool. While I can use my Weber grill to smoke ribs, I can’t really use any of my smokers to grill anything. Some companies do make smokers that double as grills though.
My primary smoking tool is a nondescript barrel-type water smoker.
The use of a water pan is a little bit of a cheat, helping guarantee that the smoke chamber temperature doesn’t get outrageous and generating a steam bath to go with the smoke. Helps the smoke adhere to the meat’s surface and also keeps the meat from drying out. It needs mostly-continual tending (both fuel/temperature and water level). But for me, smoking is as much about the journey as the destination. So that’s cool.
I can also smoke in one of two offset-smokebox charcoal grills, but those are larger and more susceptible to environmental conditions (wind, cold air, etc.) so they constitute my second tier, when I have more meat to smoke than I can fit into the water smoker.
I have a Weber kettle for actually grilling, along with the grilling surface of the offset grills.
We have a Traeger Pro 32 pellet smoker we bought on sale in 2020. It’s pretty large; when I smoke it is sometimes a chicken or lamb leg roast for the two of us, but often I’m smoking for a crowd, like two or three dozen wings or a turkey or two.
It holds its temperature pretty well. I would not say cleaning it is a breeze, but it’s straightforward. I typically spend a half hour all-in doing it. I don’t always do a deep clean after every smoke, but at least every other.
Definitely keep your grill. The high heat of the grill cooks meat differently than the low temperature of the smoker. Anything that needs a char will be better on the grill, like steak, burgers, roasted veggies, etc. You can cook those things on the smoker as well, but they won’t have as good of a char.
When thinking about a smoker, also think about how much fiddling with the smoker you’d want to do. Some smokers you have to tend to throughout the process by periodically tweaking airflow and adding wood/charcoal. Other smokers you pretty much start and don’t have to do anything. For some people, smoking is like a hobby and they enjoy all the fiddling and fussing to get a perfect result. For other people, they just want a tasty meal and want the smoker to do everything for them.
The wood pellet grills (like Traeger) are great for people who want a smoker without having to do a lot of work. You set the temp and the pellet smoker will automatically feed the pellets to maintain a constant temperature. The fancy pellet grills will even vary the temperature depending on what you are cooking to get a better result. A charcoal/wood smoker will give you an even better result, but more effort is needed to get that better result.
This basic Traeger is currently on sale for $390 ($160 off) at lots of hardware stores:
It just has the simple temperature setting without wifi capability. The fancier ones will have wifi to allow you to change the temp of the smoker and monitor the temp of the food.
Because of the long and variable cooking times in a smoker, having a way to check the temperature of the meat remotely is very useful. You don’t have to depend on the smoker to have this function. You can use a regular probe thermometer. On the grill you can cook stuff based on time pretty easily, but on the smoker you will need use the temp of the meat to know when it’s done rather than how long it’s been in the smoker.
As a data point I bought this during COVID and am still happy I have it. I only cook ribs in it and only during the 6 months of relative warmth here in the Midwest, but it gets use.
As others have said, what type of smoker is right for you guys probably comes down to a choice of budget vs. how much or little you want to mess with the smoker.
I’ve never used pellet smokers, but it sounds like they are great for ‘set it & forget it’ style performance. But they are all (I believe) pricey, and the type of fuel used is very specialized. I have practically a lifetime’s worth of seasoned apple wood from several trees that have fallen or died on my property over the years. So a pellet smoker would not be for me.
An electric smoker is probably the ultimate in ‘set it & forget it’, but I personally would never go electric. My BIL has an electric smoker, and the results from it always seem unsatisfactory. Any smoker in which the smoking is an adjunct of the process, instead of the central means of providing the heat as well as the smoke, is just wrong IMHO.
My Smoky Mountain vertical ‘bullet style’ smoker takes a little babysitting, but I like the more hands-on approach. And once things stabilize temperature-wise, it’s really not much work at all. I’ve learned some tricks over the years. Like the water pan in that style smoker-- it is only for regulating temperature. Some people might tell you to use apple juice or even wine in the pan to ‘flavor’ the meat. I tried that. It does not make a damn bit of difference. Also the steam from the pan does nothing for the meat. All the juiciness comes from fat and rendered collagen. If anything, steam will prevent a good bark from forming on the outside. For years now I’ve filled the pan with sand. It makes a great heat sink, and by putting foil on top of the sand in the pan to catch the drippings, it makes for very easy cleanup.
I’ve got a Camp Chef XXL (pellet) and a Weber Smokey Mountain (charcoal/wood chunks). I used to have a Bradley Smoker (electric) until it wore out. I’ve also got a gas grill and am seriously considering a charcoal grill as well.
Anyway, what I’ve found is that the Camp Chef just doesn’t give enough smoke to make proper barbecue, in particular brisket. The way we like brisket is highly smoked, and the pellet smoker just doesn’t create enough smoke to accomplish that. It does however, do a great job on things like chickens, turkeys, and other things that don’t need to be heavily smoked like sausages and jerky. In fact, it’s fantastic for sausage and jerky. Pork butts and ribs seem to do pretty well in it as well, although they’re still better in the WSM.
As best as I can tell, the problem is that pellet smokers have two competing tasks going on at the same time- burning wood pellets for heat, and then trying to partially combust them/make them smolder to create smoke. It seems like when you do try, you end up with the right temperature, but the smoke isn’t all that intense. Even things like smoke tubes and what-not aren’t really effective (with one caveat; Mojobricks seem to do the trick pretty well).
The WSM is fantastic, but it’s got a lot more care, feeding and fiddling. I even got a temp controller for it (the Thermoworks Signals/Billows combo) and it’s still way more fiddly than a pellet smoker. But, and it’s a big “But”, it does produce proper smoke. I can make fantastic briskets on the WSM without too much effort.
I’d keep the grill regardless; they’re for direct heat cooking/grilling. Smokers are indirect outdoor slow cookers- in general, you can’t properly cook a steak or hamburger with a smoker. If you’re looking to cook beef primarily, I’d go with the WSM or an offset smoker, and accept that you’re going to have to care for it and feed it a lot more than a pellet or electric smoker.
As far as cookbooks/references go, Aaron Franklin’s book on barbecue is really good. I prefer it to Meathead Goldwyn’s, in that Franklin’s is less about recipes and more about the how/why of what you’re doing.
My son does competitive barbecuing, and he, along with many other competitors, are increasingly using drum smokers. These are perhaps out of your price range, but he swears by them. Two suppliers:
I’ve had smokers and grills of all types over the years. If I had the room I’d have both a gas grill for the high heat and searing and an electric smoker for its effectiveness and simplicity. Pellet grills are in vogue these days, and I’ve had two, but they don’t smoke any better than the electric box I used to have and they are a lot of work to maintain. If patio space is a premium, there are some new pellet grills that can get hot enough to function as a traditional grill. I recently bought a Weber Searwood and I found I could get rid of my old gas grill.
I really don’t think the steam helps keep the meat from drying out much, if at all. You can get plenty dry meat from a wet environment, and plenty moist meat from a dry one. I’ve smoked on a WSM with a water pan for the first few years, then I changed to filling the water pan with sand for convenience. It runs slightly hotter now, but the barbecue isn’t any drier than with the water pan. I daresay it may be even more moist, but I’ve never done a side-by-side experiment, and besides even if I could, no two shoulders or racks of ribs are exactly the same, anyway.
Agreed. I’d go even farther and say steam from a water pan (or any other source, for that matter) does absolutely nothing at all to keep meat from drying out. It’s not like steam is penetrating into the meat; not even smoke penetrates very far into the meat, as seen by the smoke ring when it’s cut. Meat gets all of its ‘juiciness’ from its own fat, rendered collagen and retained natural juices (that’s why one should always let the meat rest after taking it off the heat, so the natural juices are reabsorbed into the meat fibers and don’t run out onto the plate when the meat is cut into).
One tip with smokers is that the cook time can be highly variable depending on a variety of factors. It’s not like baking in an oven. If you’re doing a 10 hour smoke of a brisket for a party at 5, don’t start it 10 hours before 5 and count on it being done exactly at 5. Especially if you’ve never smoked a brisket before. It may end up taking an hour or two longer than you expected. If you start it early, you can extend the cook time by lowering the temp a bit. You shouldn’t really increase the temp to speed things along since that reduces the benefit of smoking at a low temp.