I was finding, however, that the food coming out of this smoker wasn’t all that smoky, even when the device was maxed out on the highest smokiness setting. Perhaps related, I’d often find that it gave the food more the smell of smoke than the taste. I also consistently noticed that a near majority of the pellets that accumulated in the waste bin were not burned, or at least not very. The machine didn’t seem to gobble them up too quickly, but it certainly seemed wasteful considering how few of them were a dark enough color to have been able to emit appreciable smoke.
Still! I kinda liked it. I could be lazy, still smoke some food, and get a nice dinner out of it. I didn’t have to go outside, lug the whole grill kit out to the deck, remove the wet cover from the grill, and stand outside in the rain. I could just hit a button in my kitchen and do other things while it cooked.
Later, I seared a yogurt-marinated pork loin on my stove, and finished it in the smoker, roughly guided by a recipe from Vishwesh Bhatt’s fantastic 2022 cookbook I Am From Here to excellent effect, getting a nice sear in my cast-iron before transferring to a low temperature smoker where it could coast to a finish and pick up some pleasant smokiness.
The biggest piece of food I cooked in it was the last one, a 3.5-pound pork butt for pulled pork sandwiches. Following an America’s Test Kitchen recipe I brined the butt in a salt and sugar solution for hours in my fridge before coating it with yellow mustard, black pepper, and paprika. I left liquid smoke out of the brine to better assess how much smokiness was imparted by the smoker.
For reasons that probably revolve around making sure the pork finishes in a timely manner and avoiding the internal temperature plateau known as “the stall,” the GE recipe has you wrap the pork in foil once it hits 160 degrees Fahrenheit. This is a peculiar way to finish cooking a pork butt as it robs the cut of a crispy bark (exterior), but that’s probably OK in a setup like this which is not designed for smoking perfection but for scratching the itch when you can’t or don’t want to smoke outdoors.
