I used to be discovering, nonetheless, that the meals popping out of this smoker wasn’t all that smoky, even when the system was maxed out on the best smokiness setting. Maybe associated, I would usually discover that it gave the meals extra the scent of smoke than the style. I additionally persistently seen {that a} close to majority of the pellets that accrued within the waste bin weren’t burned, or no less than not very. The machine didn’t appear to gobble them up too shortly, but it surely actually appeared wasteful contemplating how few of them had been a darkish sufficient coloration to have been capable of emit considerable smoke.
Nonetheless! I kinda appreciated it. I might be lazy, nonetheless smoke some meals, and get a pleasant dinner out of it. I did not need to go exterior, lug the entire grill equipment out to the deck, take away the moist cowl from the grill, and stand exterior within the rain. I may simply hit a button in my kitchen and do different issues whereas it cooked.
Later, I seared a yogurt-marinated pork loin on my range, and completed it within the smoker, roughly guided by a recipe from Vishwesh Bhatt’s unbelievable 2022 cookbook I Am From Right here to wonderful impact, getting a pleasant sear in my cast-iron earlier than transferring to a low temperature smoker the place it may coast to a end and decide up some nice smokiness.
The most important piece of meals I cooked in it was the final one, a 3.5-pound pork butt for pulled pork sandwiches. Following an America’s Take a look at Kitchen recipe I brined the butt in a salt and sugar resolution for hours in my fridge earlier than coating it with yellow mustard, black pepper, and paprika. I left liquid smoke out of the brine to raised assess how a lot smokiness was imparted by the smoker.
For causes that most likely revolve round ensuring the pork finishes in a well timed method and avoiding the interior temperature plateau generally known as “the stall,” the GE recipe has you wrap the pork in foil as soon as it hits 160 levels Fahrenheit. It is a peculiar strategy to end cooking a pork butt because it robs the minimize of a crispy bark (exterior), however that is most likely OK in a setup like this which isn’t designed for smoking perfection however for scratching the itch when you may’t or do not wish to smoke outdoor.