Bradley Digital Smoker: Firing up the New Age Grill this Summer

* Disclosure: In order to facilitate this post, I received a review unit of the Bradley 4-Rack Digital Smoker. The views expressed here are entirely my own.

While touring the Housewares Show in Chicago this past spring, I found myself drawn to a small booth featuring the innovative Bradley Digital Electric Smoker and engaged in lively conversation with the company’s founders. A long time fan of electric smokers, I wanted to try out the Bradley and see how it stacked up in the smoker category.

What particularly drew my attention in terms of a profound change-up was the automatic feeding up of seasoned wood disks into the smoker every 20 minutes, instead of having to manually keep adding in soaked wood chips during the entire smoking process, which for a turkey or pork shoulder can prove burdensome and tie you close to the smoker to tend it. The smoker’s about the size of a dorm refrigerator, and easily tucks away in an outdoor deck or patio.

Easy to Use Smoking Bisquettes

So what’s with these “smoking bisquettes?” The Bradley Digital Smoker feeds these wood round disks into the interior chamber pushes them onto a heater unit where they smoke for 20 minutes each. What’s so clever about this is that the process generates clean smoke, and not the charred, ashy smoke of wood that’s fully burnt out.

The bisquettes come in a 24-pack for $9.99, so you only end up paying about $2.50 for each time you use your smoker. They also come in myriad seasoning flavors, including alder, apple, cherry, hickory, whiskey oak, maple, mesquite, oak and pecan.

Honestly, this is the feature I love most about this smoker: the auto-feeding of these disks for up to the two hour period, and easy clean up of the still held together used-up wood disks. The automatic feeder simply pushes the used up wood disks into the water basin where they get extinguished before they turn to ash. No dumping of ashes or scrubbing off burnt interior char from the inside of the grill’s stainless steel interior when done. Plus, the racks are easily removed and can be tossed into the dishwasher for cleaning.

Set It and Forget It!

The digital timer is super simple to set up. You get simply instructions for seasoning the grill by running it through one cycle before cooking with it, and it takes all of three minutes to get cooking underway once whatever you smoke is inside the smoker. Plus you have four well-spaced racks to cook vegetables alongside any meat or fish you’re smoking. You simply set temperature, time and duration of the smoking feature. You load up your choice of bisquettes in their tube feeder. You choose how much open to put the small round smoke vent at the top.

I like to keep this mostly closed to keep the smoke circulating inside. You fill the water basin at the bottom, and you’re off and about to do whatever you want without having to tend the smoker again. I love this “set it and forget it” aspect of the Bradley Smoker. You can be off to soccer games, puttering around the house, and the smoker’s out on the porch doing its thing.

We’ve used the Bradley Smoker to cook several dinners of whole smoked turkey and pork ribs so far, and all have been delicious, smoky and tender. Honestly, I thought the turkeys were the best we’ve ever made and this wonderful smoke flavor permeated all of the moist meat under a strikingly beautiful golden-brown skin. We cooked the turkey at about 220 degrees for a good seven hours. While the Bradley Smoker comes with it’s own slim cookbook to help you through the basic, it’s super easy to find exciting variations of smoker recipes online.

A Slight Critique

So what negatives, if any? For this, I relied on my chief skeptic, my husband Ron, who approaches each new cooking device with a critical eye. For him at 6’2”, stooping to seeing the digital layout at ground level proved cumbersome. He wanted it right at the top of the smoker. Solution: move the smoker to an outdoor table, or put the shorter Mom (that’s me!) in charge of the settings! Next, he wondered about the lack of a latch on the smoker door. This proved to not be an issue as never once did the seal on the door let the closed door swing open. I have to say I dismissed this one as something we’re used to on other smokers whose doors don’t seal shut but need to be held closed.

One legitimate concern of Ron’s: no built in meat thermometer. So if you’ve going based on interior meat temperature versus cooking time, you’ve got to use a free-standing separate thermometer to keep an eye out for the final temperature. For me, I tend to cook the meat on the conservative long side, and will slice it open to make sure something like a whole turkey is fully cooked through. This is clearly a matter of what you’re cooking and personal preference.

You can purchase the Bradley-4-rack digital smoker for around $370 online, though it retails closer to $500. If you want to cold smoke something like fish, cheese, nuts, garlic or salt, you can buy a cold smoker attachment for that. I’d also recommend the smoker cover for protection from the rain or snow season.

It gets a big thumbs up from me and all my family members who have devoured the delicious turkey and ribs we’ve been making weekly in it. This would make an excellent gift, too!

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