COMPARISON
Offset Smokers vs Pellet Grills
The Rundown
Smokers and pellet grills are becoming more and more popular as ways to really maximize the flavour of your cooking by infusing the delicious smokiness of different kinds of chips, wood chunks, and pellets into your dishes.We will be going through what exactly are the two and their main differences.
Offset Smokers
Offset smokers, also known as barrel and horizontal smokers, are classic ways of wood & charcoal cooking that brings things back to the basics.
Most offset smokers have a simple firebox connected to a bigger barrel that contains what you're grilling.
A quick tip is build a bed of coals to start the fire and cook and heat with wood.
Many BBQ Style competitions in America look at it as the gold standard when it comes to the art of smoking.
They are the traditional units that make up the Low N Slow BBQ Smoker cooking world and perfect for cooking meat, vegetables and more over a long period of time on low heat.
Doing so, allows heat and smoke from the fire and wood chips/chunks to pass through the cooking chamber and through the chimney of the bigger barrel.
They can be run on pure wood fire with wood chunks or charcoal with a combination of wood chips, so they don't burnt out too quickly and start infusing that intense smokiness into your cooking.
**Be careful in an offset smoker to not soak wood chips as this will give off a black choking smoke called creosote which makes your smoked meat go from tasting smokey to a bitter and dirty taste and makes the barbecue unit a nightmare to clean.
Check out Hark & Landmann for your more traditional units.
Pellet Grills
Outdoor grilling with a pellet smoker adds a bit of tech to the cooking, and is regarded as a modern spin on the traditional offset smokers.
Though similar in cooking and look, they run solely on 100% pure hardwood pellets (which are essentially compressed bits of wood).
Typically drip-fed with sensor technology, the process is made easy as the machine will automatically maintain the temperature you set and many of them come with integrated WiFi and a phone application to control remotely.
Examples of these are Traeger and Green Mountain Grills.
This takes away the trouble of watching and maintaining the temperature manually and is getting increasingly more popular, even in competition circuits.
Doing way more than just Low N Slow, pellet smokers are able to pack casual meals full of flavour.
Check out Traeger, one of the best known American brands of pellet grills, and & Hark for more details.
