Best Electric 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.

The same cabinet, racks and bisquette feeder as the Original, with a digital controller that sets temperature, cook time and smoke time as three independent numbers and a thermostat that actually holds the set point. That last part is the reason to pay the $160 difference: the Original's dial is a power setting, this one closes the loop. Ceiling rises slightly to 280°F.

Bradley's smoke source is unlike anything else in this catalog: instead of a chip tray or a pellet auger, a feeder advances a compressed hardwood puck onto a 125W burner every twenty minutes, then drops the spent one into a water bowl before it can turn to ash and acrid smoke. Load the tube and it produces nine hours of clean smoke unattended. The Original is the analog model - a dial for the 500W oven element, a separate switch for the smoke burner, and nothing else. Four 11 x 13 in racks, 572 sq in, a polished stainless interior.

The Masterbuilt 30-inch Digital Electric Smoker is the best-selling electric smoker in the US, a vertical cabinet with digital temperature control and a side wood-chip loader. It's the simplest way to smoke meat.

Bradley's top cabinet and the only one with PID control: 1000W across two 400W elements and two 100W bisquette burners, a full stainless body, dual meat probes, and a controller that adjusts in one-degree steps and stores up to fifty programmes over USB. Ten hours of smoke per bisquette load against the smaller models' nine, 806 sq in of rack rather than 572, and an 86-320°F range that reaches both cold-smoking territory and a usable finishing temperature. The 4.3-star average over 248 reviews is the lowest in the line, which is worth knowing before spending $1,100.

The 40-inch step up from the 30-inch already in the catalog: the same insulated cabinet and side wood-chip loader, stretched to four racks and 970 sq in. An electric smoker heats with a resistance element and makes smoke by smouldering chips in a tray beside it, which is a fundamentally different mechanism from a pellet cabinet's auger — the smoke is thinner and more controllable, and you can hold 160°F for cold-ish work such as sausage or cheese. The viewing window and glass door are on the pricier Window and Legs variant, not this one.

Masterbuilt's current connected electric cabinet, and the model that replaced the older Bluetooth-only digital smokers. It is narrower and deeper than the 40-inch — 710 sq in over four racks — and adds WiFi through the Masterbuilt app with support for four meat probes, one of which is in the box. The cooking mechanism is unchanged: a resistance element plus a side-loading wood-chip tray, so the temperature ceiling is still 275°F.

Pit Boss's largest electric cabinet and the direct competitor to Masterbuilt's 40-inch. A 1,650-watt element heats the cabinet and a chip tray beside it makes the smoke; there is no auger and no burn pot, so the smoke is the thin, controllable kind an element produces rather than the heavier output of a pellet cabinet. It undercuts the Masterbuilt 710 WiFi by adding 610 sq in at a lower price, and the 300°F ceiling is 25°F above Masterbuilt's.