There’s a low hum of excitement in a conversation when a home chef talks meat and exclaims, “I bet that would taste so good smoked”. It’s not an uncommon declaration. An intersect occurs between wishful thinking and reality when planning an outdoor kitchen and you make a firm decision: it’s time to integrate an outdoor built-in smoker.
I will walk through the major components to analyze before buying an outdoor built-in smoker and provide ideas for a checklist of standards to note when entering your search. I’ll section our exploration into three dominant categories: the preparational factors used to narrow your focus, such as types of smokers available and price, the elements of construction in an outdoor built-in smoker that determine quality, and the innate features that elevate a model from forgettable into the realm of the elite.
Types and Installation: the Preparational Considerations for Your Outdoor Built-in Smoker
I consider this category the “logistical fundamentals”, covering the basic essential elements you’ll want to think through before even glancing at specific models. This includes the baseline planning points of your budget, the types of smokers available to you, and aligning the smoker’s style with your outdoor kitchen’s aesthetic.
Pellet, Kamado, Offset, and Bullet: Four Species of Outdoor Built-in Smokers
I’ll cover four subsets of outdoor built-in smokers prominent on the market. Each of them will make your meat taste delicious, but with nuances of flavor unique to their fuel and cooking methodologies. It’s also notable that there are over a half dozen types of freestanding smokers, but we are focused on those specifically meant to be built into your outdoor kitchen.
Built-in outdoor pellet smokers
Pellet smokers are your most independent option in terms of cooking your food without the chef’s attention. They’re also the most high-maintenance to implement, as they require an electrical hookup. A built-in pellet smoker is plugged into your outlet and fed with compressed sawdust wood pellets into a chamber, often with a 20- to 25-pound capacity, that holds the pellets and gravity-feeds them into a rotating auger. The auger slowly pushes them into a firepot with an ignition rod that sparks the pellets and produces smoke. A fan blows up from underneath to disperse the smoke through the grill racks.
A unique draw to the pellet smoker is that it’s completely automated. You set the temperature and a timer, walk away, and the pellet slow-cooks your meat with no hovering check-ins needed. It’s a versatile option because you can mix and match wood pellet flavors to create charred masterpieces with flavors like apple, cherry, hickory, mesquite, or more obscure concoctions like wine-flavored and pecan. Pellet smokers provide a natural wood flavor without artificial residue, evenly dispersed heat, and a range of sizes that can accommodate a small patio space or feed a family reunion. The pellet smoker’s cousin, the electric smoker, is an alternative electric option that uses a heating element under wood chips rather than pellets in a chamber. Electric smokers have similar capabilities and often come at a more inexpensive price range.
Built-in Offset Smokers
Offset smokers are synonymous with horizontal smokers and indirect-heat pit smokers, and built-in offset smokers will often advertise themselves as “built-in charcoal smokers”. All these titles add up to a similar result: a profound depth of flavor.
What I mean by this is that it’s a smoker designed for extended slow-cooks at low temperatures, and this allows the meat to be fully saturated with succulent, smoked flavor, teasing out subtle layers of charred bliss onto your palate. Modern offset smokers hold a firebox on the side of the unit and filter smoke out of the firebox and into the cooking chamber. They utilize both wood and charcoal as fuel and carry an air of legacy as one of the earliest old-time slow cookers. Unlike the pellet smoker, an offset smoker is an interactive tool – the meat and firebox need consistent yet well-timed attention, and it’s a quality option for a chef who enjoys the engagement of smoking meats.
Built-in Outdoor Bullet Smokers
Bullet smokers simply excel in the presence of beginner smoked-meat enthusiasts. While they’re technically not built-in to the facing of your outdoor kitchen range, I consider them a built-in option because their size allows them to slide into any corner or open space in your outdoor kitchen. Bullet smokers are sleek, and petite, ideal for small patio spaces and portion sizes, and add a flair of rustic elegance to any outdoor setup. Bullet smokers operate without complexity – it’s a cylindrical vertical cooking chamber, with a wood and charcoal firebox underneath, and a water pan in between the two chambers that is heated by the firebox and dissipates the smoke through the cooking chamber. Bullet smokers are inexpensive, compact and carry a quick learning curve.
Built-in Kamado Smokers
Kamado-style smokers are ceramic models, capable of heating up to 700 degrees, revered for their slow-cook heat retention and high material quality. They’re on the high end of the expense spectrum due to their durability, but you may never have to replace a kamado smoker. It’s important to recognize that most kamado smokers are freestanding, but they can be found as dual standalone/built-in models that include side trays and allow you to slide the unit into an existing outdoor kitchen.
Their intense heat ability allows them to excel at searing foods, and they earn status as an extremely versatile smoker with the skillset to slow-cook a day-long pork shoulder or perfectly sear a pair of strip steaks. A kamado smoker feeds off charcoal and wood and can double as a grill if you remove the heat shields. The downside of a kamado is its weight – the material insulates so well because a large ceramic kamado smoker can weigh up to 500 pounds.
Price Range of Your Outdoor Built-in Smoker
The immediately recognizable downside to buying an outdoor built-in smoker is that built-in models are significantly more expensive than their freestanding counterparts. An alternative to buying a built-in smoker requiring installation is to buy a freestanding unit and slide it into a designated space near your grill setup. Quality compact vertical electric smokers can be found in a reasonable spectrum of $150 to $300 and are designed specifically to complement an existing kitchen range setup.
High-end built-in pellet smokers are promoted to have a sophisticated, advanced brand, and their prices will often range from $1,800 to $5,000. A quality built-in 18-inch tall kamado smoker/grill combo can be found for around $1,700 with sliding side trays. Because of its unique, alien shape, squat tabletop kamado models exist for around $600 and include just over 200 square inches of rack space. I put more weight in considering a small tabletop built-in model because of the installation hassle – 18- to 24-inch kamado models sit in a nest on legs and may weigh 400 pounds, not an easy weight to transport and position.
The higher-end built-in offset charcoal models sit in the $1,800 range, but you don’t have to blow out your wallet on a quality smoker. Built-in grill/smoker combo units designed for pellets and charcoal may run up to $1,800, but affordable models exist between $400 and $600. I strongly recommend investigating the combo setups, as you can save hundreds of dollars instead of buying a separate grill and smoker.
Style Choices for Your Built-in Smoker
Most built-in smokers are presented in the neutral chrome aesthetic of 304 commercial-grade stainless steel. However, many models are steel with a powder-coated jet-black matte or gloss finish and exude a more alluring traditional pit barbecue aesthetic. Buyers drawn to eccentricity in their kitchen can find a layer of quirkiness in the kamado-style smokers. They pull off a gorgeous, artistic presentation with a hammered ceramic texture and vibrant color choices that vary from crimson to forest green.
Factors that Determine Quality in an Outdoor Built-in Smoker
Features like cooking chamber size, smoker type, and wood, charcoal, or pellet fuel are subjective choices made by the person tending the smoker. Part of the excitement of a built-in smoker is for the cook to learn preferences through experimentation with different recipes and cook temperatures. An objective baseline of quality is the smoker’s material durability, and that’s found in 304 commercial-grade stainless steel.
304 Commercial Grade Stainless Steel
It’s a highly durable, well-insulated, rust-resistant alloy that serves as the standard for industrial appliances. Your smoker must endure all-day sessions at temperatures from 200 to 700 degrees. Outside of the freakishly well-insulated ceramic of kamado-style smokers, double-layered stainless steel is the foundational standard for built-in smokers. Many models will include triple-layered insulated steel with grill racks made of 6mm nickel-plated steel. A full-sized 800-1000 square inch stainless-steel built-in charcoal smoker isn’t quite the tank of a kamado model but is still built of between 235 and 295 pounds of layered steel cooking power.
Max Temperature
An important consideration in the planning process is to think about the style in which you’ll most often cook. If you aspire to sear pizzas and steaks at extremely high temperatures, you may want to investigate the selection of kamado-style models capable of a 700-degree ceiling. Legitimate built-in charcoal smokers often have a temperature ceiling of 700 degrees, but many models top out around 350 degrees, and you’ll want to examine the specifications for maximum temperature settings.
The Subtle Conveniences: The Features Included in the Best Outdoor Built-in Smokers
I call them “subtle conveniences” because they aren’t missed until you don’t have them. A couple of available accessories can streamline the smoking process and improve your level of enjoyment with your new smoker.
Meat Storage: Smoker Side Shelves and Built-in Drawers
Grill and smoker storage space is taken for granted, as it seems so natural to include it, but many smoker models do not carry adequate space for placing plates of meat and utensils. Bullet smokers and compact digital electric smokers often arrive without additional storage. To expand your food prep space, it may suit you to search out the offset smokers with dual shelf trays or the kamado-style models with dual sliding shelves. It’s also a bonus to find models with sliding drawers for utensils, a rare and underappreciated feature in built-in smokers.
Wi-Fi-enabled Smokers
This feature is specific to some pellet smokers that want to blow you away with their advanced digital abilities. A Wi-Fi-enabled pellet smoker allows you to connect your phone to the grill via Bluetooth, walk away, and control the temperature and timer directly from a grill app on your phone.
Meat Thermometer, Spring-assisted Hood and Grill Lights
Yes, it will only save a few dollars from buying one separately, but if I’m going all-in on a smoker setup, I want every included accessory. Many models will include a durable meat probe for checking internal temperatures. Like a thermometer, a spring-assisted hood is by no means a dealbreaker, but it’s noticeably helpful when carrying a large tray of meat to be able to open and close the smoker lid with a deft nudge of the elbow or knuckles. If I’m demanding a thermometer and spring-assisted hood, I want to complete the trifecta with built-in LED lighting. An all-day slow-cook often means you’re pulling a pork shoulder off the rack at dark, and innate grill lighting is immensely useful.
Rugged and Refined: Expand Your Flavor Range with an Outdoor Built-in Smoker
It seems like an oxymoron to describe a cooking appliance as “rugged and refined”, but the smoker defies outdoor cooking norms. An outdoor smoker carries a legacy, and the reason people will drive to a stand and pay for a good barbecue is that it takes skill to do it just right. The cook and the smoker work in tandem, aspiring to create succulent, juicy chunks of inner elegance coupled with the rugged exterior of perfectly darkened rib meat and crisped, charred chicken skin.
A built-in smoker isn’t just an outdoor kitchen accessory – it’s a new hobby and a skill set to master. What’s the best way to learn? It’s easy – start eating.
