A Pellet Grill Smoker can do a lot of cooking, but often I get asked do they cook while smoking, it’s a fair enough question. I thought I would give a quick answer, as well as an in-depth answer and explain smoking/cooking and smoking/drying (cold smoking).
Being a mega-fan of the easiest smoker technology out there (yes pellet grill smokers), when I started looking at pellet grills, I deep dived into full-on researching analytically what they could do compared to the other smokers I have, hence this site was born.
Does a Pellet Grill Smoker Cook While Smoking? Any pellet grill smoker cooks whilst smoking food. A pellet grill smoker operates between approximately 160-350°F / 71-230°C. Food will be fried, seared and baked, this means cooking will be done by direct heat barbeque grilling or indirect low and slow smoking.
What Can a Pellet Grill Smoker Cook?
One of the marketing spiels I read about when I was looking into different brands of smokers, was that a pellet grill is a 7 in 1 cooker, yes that are.
- Grill
- Braise
- BBQ
- Smoke (Hot Smoking or Low & Slow Smoking)
- Bake
- Sear
- Roast
Many folks see a pellet grill as a smoker only, but that’s just not the case, it actually can do quite a bit of the cooking action.
It can grill sausages, steaks, vegetables and mushrooms – basically anything a gas grill could do.
There are some tips that can help make it a better searer too.
Remembering that a pellet grill smoker is basically, a pellet wood-fired oven, with more smoke. They can have some variation in air/heat circulation but are the same time concept.
They are all pushing air around the cooking area as well.
If you want a table comparison of the different heat temperature pellet grills you can get, check out the table I put together on this page all about pellet grill temps.
Primarily, the advantage of this is the searing (which still works great a 450°F.) and if you want to crank out classic Neopolitan thin crust pizza in under 2 minutes then more heat would be needed.
The chef ‘carmalizing’ of protein ie searing it said to occur from 350°F/177°C.
Pellet Grill Direct or Indirect Cooking
This is the really easy way of thinking about pellet grill smokers, you either have the heat hitting the steak or vege directly.
Or you have some diffusion of heat or indirect heat, this is the low & slow smoking, baking, roasting or braising method (pretty much just like an oven, apart from the smoke).
Apart from sous vide (cooking in a bag, in a water bath) – pretty sure these are the two main ways of cooking with heat I can think of.
Hot Smoking and Cold Smoking on a Pellet Grill
Hot Smoking is basically how the pellet grill works cooking/smoking at the same time. However, you can easily use a pellet grill to do cold smoking as well.
It’s not something that is standard in the pellet grill, but a simple device can turn the cooking area into a cold smoking area.
Cold smoking is applying salt via dry curing or brining to meat (can talk cold smoking dairy and vege too). Once the salt has stabilized and inhibited the meat, moisture has been removed and a level of preservation has occurred.
You may have heard of salt beef, fish or pork (used on long voyages back in the day before refrigeration). – salt-cured (dry-cured often) preserved but not smoked.
Cold smoke us used to dry the meat and the beneficial preservation properties of the smoke help create something that can be stored without refrigration (check out this Italian Dry Curing Shop – All the dry cured and cold meat is just hung around at ambient temperature (it’s all across Central and Southern Europe too) meat is just hung.
If you want to cold smoke, it’s not a complex as one might think. It’s something I have been doing for 20 years (many times not on a pellet grill, but many places can we used ie. card box, kettle grill, gas bbq) but sometimes it seems there just isn’t quality information about cold smoking out there (check out the Central and Eastern Europe, where cold smoking was always used for preserving, for hundreds of years, and still is common today commercially and with the backyarders).
You basically just need some airflow going through, and an external or 3rd party smoke generator. This can be as simple as a pellet tube that burns pellet wood slowly, I use a 12″ tube regularly like this in many different types of smokers and contraptions.
I knew a Dutch butcher who just burned a pile of sawdust on the ground in huge metal containers when it was cold, obviously he had done it a few thousand times I imagine!
Performance of a Pellet Grill at Smoking/Cooking
When you start reading what people have written, you start to see some people judging the pellet grill as not a great smoker.
It does an awesome job in my opinion at burning a nice clean fire.
I think this completely depends on what criteria you are setting (and yes you can boost the smoking of a pellet grill if you so desire many ways), the pellet grill is all about clean-burning wood. This is something that I find a real benefit. Charcoal that isn’t pure hardwood, they say can be dubious for your health.
Also, the fat dripping onto burning charcoal or woods is said to be putting something onto you food that isn’t good for you.
A pellet grill negates this, and to a certain degree, the fat dripping will catch when low and slow smoking.
Should the Smoker be Smoking
Yes, it is an odd question in a way.
People talk a lot about thin blue smoke, this is basically burning clean with enough airflow and heat going.
Note, at high temperatures you just don’t get smoke, since everything is just burning without smoke (yes not technical).
But you do notice on a pellet grill, the smoke can be very faint at times.
But let me give you an example, the other day we did some steaks on the Traeger, we also have some delicious organic pork sausages.
We gave the sausages a 15 min burst on the super smoke mode.
Check out the pink smoke ring, my chef friend who I got the sausages off, who have eaten these sausages hundreds of times in the kitchen – said the enhanced flavor was certainly noticeable and they were tasty as.
We just cranked the Traeger at the end and then finished the sausages off for 5 minutes on direct heat with the meat as well.
Gear for Cold Smoking Device
To do the cold smoking on a pellet grill, you could use:
- Pellet tube
- Smoke generator
- Accessory cold smoker (some pellet grills have these as add ons)
- Maze smoker
As long as the temperature stays under about 25-30°C or 77-86°F
For most types of cold smoking like salmon, bacon, and salami – and other longer-term cold smokes, that may be for 8 hours or multiple days. Having a reasonable moist/humid environment also helps.
This is something I only learned many years later when I started cold smoking, after reading some commercial cold smoking books.
For cold smoking easy things like vegetables or diary, it only takes 30 to 60 mins, so moisture inside the area doesn’t seem to matter as much.
If you want to read more about cold smoking, here is a comprehensive article all about this technique.
If you want more info on cold smoking, I wrote about it on my other curing salt – eatcuredmeat.com – check out the post here.
