Pellet smokers all the rage for backyard cooks
For many backyard barbecue cooks, the process and ceremony of smoking meat is something like an addiction.
Things start innocently enough — your wife invites friends over for a Super Bowl party, and you’re in charge of the burgers and hot dogs. You make the trek to Home Depot and purchase the familiar domeshaped kettle grill, charcoal and lighter fluid.
The burgers and hot dogs turn out pretty good (“Hey, I can cook!”), and the pomp and circumstance of your beer-drinking buddies standing around the grill providing unsolicited grilling advice is a great way to while away a Sunday afternoon.
You might eventually graduate to one of those long, stainless-steel gas grills or maybe even an offset, all-wood-burning barrel smoker (“stick burner”).
In the past few years, however, a new option has become available. You may choose to upgrade to a pellet smoker — the current gadget of choice among smoke-addicted backyard barbecue warriors.
The value proposition of a pellet smoker is simple: Cook great barbecue, efficiently, with minimal effort. The manual nature of an offset barrel smoker requires the amateur pitmaster to constantly monitor the temperature in the cooking chamber to make sure the meat is cooking consistently.
If the temperature gets too hot, he can adjust the dampers to restrict air flow, introducing less oxygen, creating a less-intense fire and lower temperature.
If the temperature isn’t hot enough, he can open the dampers, creating more oxygen draw, and add wood to the firebox to create a bigger fire.
This process may require hourly tending of the pit to ensure a consistent cook. For the typical home cook who wants to properly smoke a brisket for 10-12 hours but who also has a family to tend to, this manual process is not realistic. That’s where the pellet smoker comes in.
These smokers use a system of mechanical and electronic parts to automate cooking/smoking food at a consistent temperature. They leverage food-grade wood pellets — basically, wood that has been ground into sawdust and then compressed into small cylinders that burn extremely efficiently — as the combustion source.
The parts of a pellet smoker are the “hopper” where the pellets are stored and an “auger,” or screwlike device, that delivers the pellets to the “burn pot” where an electronic “hot rod” heats up to set fire to the pellets, with the help of a fan that blows air into the burn pot to control the intensity of the fire.
The burn pot sits at the bottom of the cooking chamber where the meat is bathed in the heat and smoke created by the burning pellets. A thermostat in the cooking chamber monitors the temperature and sends electronic signals to the auger to deliver less or more pellets, and to the fan to create more or less intense fire.
Pellet smokers have gained a reputation for producing excellent barbecue even though the process is automated. You are likely to see pellet smokers used at your favorite barbecue competition, such as the World’s Championship Bar-B-Que Contest at the Houston Rodeo.
It’s also a perfect match for time-starved backyard cooks. In Houston, venerable pit maker Pitts & Spitts is introducing its second generation of pellet smokers this winter.
The Maverick 850, 1250 and 2000 models (the number refers to the area of the cook surface) offer even more advanced features for the backyard cook and gadget freak. Granular temperature controls, a smoke-level setting and a probe to monitor the internal temperature of the meat combine with the controller algorithm to keep temperatures within a 10-degree range.
The smoker can be connected to your local WiFi network, and the backyard warrior can monitor and control the cooking from the comfort of his favorite recliner using an app on his mobile phone.
Though most pellet smokers have these features, Pitts & Spitts distinguishes itself by combining the mechanical and electronic parts with the heavy-duty, all-welded construction and trademark stainlesssteel roll-top lid that it is known for.
Pellet smokers are certainly a bigger investment in cost than the kettle grill that most backyard barbecue cooks started with. But the time spent with family and friend is worth it. Your beer-drinking buddies will undoubtedly still offer advice on how to cook on it.