I have a larger offset that’s really stable. Once it’s up and running, I only have to feed it about a log an hour to maintain 250 or so. Anything colder than 250 and the fire flames out on it, though. It will hold 36lbs of brisket, but it costs me $20 or so if I’m doing an all-day smoke. It’s not cost effective if you’re only smoking 1 brisket or one pork shoulder. It also takes almost an hour to get up and running before you can put the meat on.
The pellet grill only takes about 30 minutes. The 20lb bag of pellets is only ~$15 and I have yet to burn through an entire bag. I’ll have to wait until after I do a brisket or pulled pork to fully tell how the smoke is going to do.
I did cedar plank salmon on it last night. I ran the grill at 400 degrees and the fish came out perfect.
This is the first thing I’ve used that had the simplicity of a propane grill but the taste of wood-fired. I never got in to using a charcoal grill because I didn’t like the amount of cleanup it took after you used it.
Here’s a screenshot of the cook of the leg quarters from Sunday. One of my fears is that the controller goes out in the middle of a cook. I hook up the FireBoard to alert me if the pit temperatures go out of my set values. I also use it to alert me when the meat hits certain temperatures. For the leg quarters, I ran the pit on the ‘smoke’ setting until the meat temperature hit 125. Then I bumped up the pit temp to 350 so that the skin could crispy up.
Back in the day I would have done the leg quarters on the smoker and then finished them off upside down on the propane grill to do the same thing.
