Cookshack Grills & Smokers

Cookshack build electric cabinets the way commercial kitchens do, and the Smokette Elite is the smallest one: double-walled stainless around 850°F Spin-Glas insulation, so the outside stays cool and the inside holds a set temperature through weather that shuts down a thin-walled cabinet. Smoke comes from a couple of ounces of real wood chunks in a steel box on the element, not chips or pucks - you load it once for the whole cook. 504 sq in over two 14 x 18 in grills, 20-25 lbs of meat, a digital cook-and-hold controller and a meat probe, on four lockable casters.

The big Cookshack: same double-walled stainless and 850°F Spin-Glas insulation as the Smokette Elite, scaled to four 14 x 18 in grills, 1,008 sq in and a 50 lb meat capacity, with two-position side racks so you can reconfigure the interior for tall cuts. The digital cook-and-hold controller and meat probe carry over. At $2,375 it is priced against a good offset or a high-end pellet grill, and what it buys instead is an insulated box that will run all night at 225°F in any weather without you touching it.

Cookshack builds in Ponca City, Oklahoma and sells direct; the PG500 is its competition pellet grill, designed with pitmaster Fast Eddy Maurin. Its distinguishing feature is a charbroiler section — a direct-fire zone over the fire pot with a stainless rod grate — alongside separate indirect racks and a warming drawer, giving four genuinely different cooking zones in one cabinet. At 330 lbs of stainless it is built like commercial equipment rather than backyard hardware, and priced accordingly.