We received this awesome BBQ tool a few weeks ago, but it has been to hot for me to take it out for a test run. The weather has been a bit forgiving lately and is in the low 70's in the morning. I took advantage of this and smoked some sharp cheddar cheese with the A-Maze-N-Pellet-Smoker. Cold smoking is a different beast than hot smoking, and the end results are very different. I was looking forward to testing this unit out. It almost sounded to good to be true. 10+ hours of smoke on a few handfuls of pellets. Well I was about to find out.
I was impressed with the quality of this smoker box. It is heavy for it's size and is very well constructed.
The bottom has two bars welded to it to allow air flow underneath the box. In addition this helps make the box very rigid.
It takes less than 1 1/4 lbs of pellets to fill the smoker box.
The MAPP gas torch worked really well for lighting a small area at the end of the smoker box.
In under a minute both ends were properly lit and burning.
About 10 minutes later the flames had gone out and the pellets started smoking. It is important to let them burn out on their own. I found that if you blow them out prematurely the pellets will go out.
As you can see the smoker temperature was barely above the ambient temperature.
I decided to smoke 1 lb block of Tillamook sharp cheddar cheese.
I put the cheese on at 8:30 am. Look how much smoke that little box is pumping out. Incredible.
After 1 1/2 hours I decided to take the cheese off. The smoker box had been putting out great smoke and I did not want to over smoke the cheese. It smelled terrific. I wish I did not have to wait for the better part of a week before I can use it. I am thinking grilled cheese sandwiches with green chilies or maybe macaroni and cheese. What do you think would be a good use for it?
I vacuum sealed it and put it in the refrigerator for the next 5 days. I will let you know how it turned out.
After1 1/2 hours the pellets are only burned half way on each side. So each row will burn for approximately 3 hours. This give you 9+ hours of smoke from less than 1.25 lbs of pellets if you only light one side.
As you can see, even when lit at both ends, it had little effect on the smoker temperature. It never added more than 10 degrees to the ambient temperature. I am sure that if I filled my water pan with ice it would probably zero out the additional heat altogether. Come November, I should be able to run this all night and never break 60 degrees inside the smoker. I am definitely going to try smoking bacon and salmon with this once it cools off a bit more.
All in all I found the A-Maze-N-Pellet-Smoker to be an effective, well built, unique BBQ accessory that almost anyone with a grill or smoker could make good use of.