Originally Posted by
Bustercluck
Heres my take.
like sitkaspruce said, Bradley for salmon and sausage.
I haven’t seen the pit boss, but I think the traeger is the easiest and most user friendly style of smoker/bbq to use. If you get the model that you can hook up to your phone, you can check it while you’re downtown and I think you can even shut it off. Just set the temp and forget about it. Traegers are definitely better at lower temps for doing stuff like bacon. Some friends of ours have an eleven year old girl who cooks on their traeger with no help all the time.
The kamado (kamado joe, big green egg)style is a lot more labour intensive and takes more babysitting, but the flavour you get from charcoal mixed with some hardwood is like nothing else. I’m not sure what the cost is like to run a pellet grill, but good charcoal isn’t cheap. I mostly use the kamado joe brand which is 32.99 a bag. I’ve tried a few others, the cheap kings Ford charcoal doesn’t have good flavour, I tried some formed coconut sticks that were very clean tasting almost like propane, but my fav is the big block kamado joe. Kamado grills also take some time to warm up, you have to build your fire first and wait for it to warm up and if it gets too hot than it takes quite a while to cool back down. Expect to be waiting 45 minutes before you plan on smoking something at low temps, but it’s a lot faster if you want to run it hot for doing steaks. I also find the kamado has a hard time running below 200 degrees, it takes some babysitting to do stuff like bacon, but at 225-250 you can pretty well walk away from it for 6-8 hours if you’re doing a brisket and it will run for at least 18 hours on one load of charcoal running at those temps.
Ive heard some of the propane smokers run very hot and are hard to do low and slow, but I haven’t paid attention to the models people were talking about.