If you’re an enthusiast of outdoor grilling, you should probably not miss out on a pellet smoker, which is considered the perfect smoking maker for cooking tasty meat. It can serve many functions, such as smoking, baking, and grilling meat.
But how does a pellet smoker work? In today’s article, we will show you its operation, and some tips for cooking meat with this machine. So, let’s dive into it now!
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How Does A Pellet Smoker Work?
It’s a piece of cake to understand how a pellet smoker works. To be more specific, a pellet smoker heats the food through convection. Pellet woods are utilized to make fire, and then a fan stokes the fire to generate convection heat to cook your foods.
The Burning Of Wood Pellets
A pellet smoker uses fuel from wood pellets that burn slowly and give off clean smoke. Also, there is a hopper where you can put in these pellets.
This machine offers an auger run by electricity to dispense pellets into the bottom of the cooking chamber (or the pot). The pellet grill’s thermometer will control the number of pellets fed into the pot.
How pellets move to the pot depends on your cooking settings. The pellets move briskly if your setting is hot and fast cooking, or move gradually on the contrary.
Heat Generation
Extra fuel in the form of oxygen is blown over the burn pot to increase the burn rate and regulate a nice, steady, and efficient burn.
There is a hot rod in the pot to ignite the pellet wood for fires, with the help of the air coming through small holes in the pot. When your pellets start burning, you will hear the turbulent sound almost like a jet engine. That means the fire is generating and intensifying.
Afterward, a blower will keep moving the air around for maximum burning efficiency.
On top of that, there is a controller outside the pellet smoker to manage the temperature through the level of airflow. It is all thanks to heavy-duty induction fans installed under the auger in the pellet smoker to make the air ventilate down the pot. The lower your temperature is, the more smoke is created.
A pellet smoker allows you to heat meat at a range of 150oF to 550oF. Hence, you can either sear your meat or cook it slowly at a low temperature. Also, most pellet smokers will be equipped with a meat probe to help you control the meat’s internal temperature during cooking.
Tips On Using Pellet Smoker To Smoke Meat
Use Your Thermometer
In order to get the best taste of the meat, you should cook it to the perfect temperature. But not every pellet smoker is equipped with a temperature probe, some are poor-quality and often imprecise.
Therefore, get yourself a quality thermometer so that you can cook your meat at your desired temperature. As such, you don’t have to keep opening the cooking chamber only to check your meat grilling.
Try Blending Hardwoods
Instead of only using one type of wood every time, why don’t you combine it with other wood types? You may not know that different meat gives off a nicer taste when smoked with other good woods.
On top of that, you had better try combining such base wood as alder, hickory with fruitwoods like apple or cherry.
Particularly, the common recipe for beef is to mix with all woods except for apples. Or, fish is tastier if you utilize alder, mesquite, or oak.
Use Upper Racks
In case you have a lot of food, let’s consider using upper racks to utilize your woods to grill more dishes.
They also allow you to place your meat far from the heat source. The finished grilled meat will give off more flavors and tenderness because they are cooked more by convection than heat.
Learn How To Reverse Sear
If you expect the medium-rare meat to be cooked edge-to-edge, you may need to learn how to reverse sear. To make the perfect finish for the steak, you should cook the meat under very low heat and ensure none of it is not overcooked.
Based on your type of pellet, you should grill the meat you are cooking, then place it in the pellet smoker when the temperature reaches 225oF. Once your meat’s internal temperature reaches 125oF, which typically takes 45 minutes to an hour for a 2″ thick steak (for medium-rare), let’s take your meat out.
Then, pull up to 550oF, place the meat in, and sear it for a couple of minutes. What you receive at last is medium-rare meat with a great crust. How perfect it is!
In A Nutshell
A pellet smoker should be the priority for outdoor grilling because of its various cooking usages.
We hope our today’s answer to the question of how does a pellet smoker work has satisfied you. Also, with the help of our accompanied tips in cooking meat by this equipment, the next time you will understand it more and use it effectively.
That is the end of our today’s article. Stay tuned, love grilling, and see you at the next articles!
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