If you’ve ever spent a day smoking ribs with a charcoal smoker, you know how hard it can be to keep the meat cooking at a consistent temperature. Gas smokers are somewhat easier to control, but still require constant attention in order to maintain the low and slow cooking method that produces smoky, fall-off-the-bone ribs. With the Char-Broil Digital Electric Smoker with SmartChef Technology ($399.99), all you have to do is program the smoker from your Android or iOS device, hit a button, and sit back with a few cold ones until the app tells you that your food is ready. You’ll pay a bit more for this smoker than you will for a non-connected electric model, and quite a bit more than you will for a basic charcoal model. But if you want consistently excellent smoked food without the hassle that comes with a traditional smoker, it’s worth every penny, and is worthy of our Editors’ Choice distinction.

Design and Features
The Digital Electric Smoker is an attractive insulated vertical smoker with a two-toned black and silver steel housing and a glass front door. It measures 32.5 by 18.1 by 16.5 inches (HWD) and features a spacious 725-square-inch cooking cabin with a temperature range of 100-275 degrees and four 15-by-12.5-inch removable cooking racks. A heavy-duty latch secures the door and forms a tight seal while cooking. At the bottom of the cabin is a removable drip tray that is slightly angled down to the left, which makes it easy for fat and other drippings to collect in the water pan below. Filling the water pan is optional, but it’s a good idea if you want to keep certain meats moist.

A steel smoker box sits off to the right of the water pan. It has a handle for easy removal and holds up to four cups of wood chips. You can also use pellets, but wood chunks are not recommended. The interior of the box has fill lines to help you add the right amount of smoke; fill the box to the ¼ line for 2-4 hours of smoke, ½ for 3-5 hours, ¾ for 4-6 hours, and 1 (full) for 6-8 hours. The included manual tells you which woods to use for heavy and lighter smoke flavors. You can also cook without adding wood chips, but the box must be in place regardless. The smoker comes with a meat probe that plugs into a port located just below the exterior control panel.

The control panel, mounted above the door at the top of the smoker, contains a large Start button surrounded by a light ring that tells you what’s going on at a glance. When the light is solid green, the smoker is online and ready to go, while blinking green indicates that a cooking profile has been loaded and the Start button needs to be pressed to begin the cooking cycle. The light ring has four quadrants; each individual quadrant flashes orange to show you how far along you are in the cooking cycle, and all of them flash orange when cooking is complete. Upon completion, the smoker goes into a 15-minute Warming mode. A flashing red light indicates an error such as a lost Wi-Fi connection.

Other controls include a Cabin Light button, a DADO button used to connect to your Wi-Fi, and a Preset button. The DADO button will remain dark when the smoker is not connected to the internet, blink once per second when the smoker needs to be reconnected to Wi-Fi, and blink twice per second during a firmware update. A solid light indicates a good internet connection.The Preset button is used to initiate one of three pre-programmed cooking cycles; preset number 1 is for Pulled Pork and programs the smoker to cook the meat to 205 degrees at a cabin temperature of 225 degrees, preset 2 is for Beef Brisket, which cooks to 200 degrees at a steady 225 degrees, and preset 3 is for Smoked Fish, which cooks the meat to 150 degrees at 225 degrees. A small panel above the button tells you which preset has been activated. There are two small wheels and a recessed handle at the rear of the smoker that make it easy to move it around your yard or deck, and there’s a pull-out grease tray on the right side that catches anything that gets past the drip tray.

Connectivity and App
Char-Broil’s SmartChef Technology is a combination of hardware and software that lets you monitor and control the cooking process using an Android or iOS app and a smartphone. The smoker itself uses 802.11n wireless technology to connect to your Wi-Fi network and deliver real-time data such as internal meat temperature (as measured with the probe), cabin temperature, and estimated cook time. It also uses the internet to access local weather information to calculate cooking times based on outdoor temperatures, which is helpful.

The app is easy to use and offers three cooking modes that are available from the Dashboard: the above-mentioned Preset mode, Guided Cook mode, and Manual Cook mode. Guided Cook mode uses pre-programmed recipes for smoking beef, chicken, pork, seafood, and turkey. It automatically sets the cabin and meat probe target temperatures and calculates the total cooking time, but recipe choices are slim. For example, the lone seafood recipe is for smoked salmon, and there are only two entries for beef (smoked brisket and smoked prime rib). Pork recipes include baby back ribs, pulled pork, and pork tenderloin, and the chicken and turkey recipes are for smoking whole birds. However, the folks at Char-broil have assured me that they will be including many new recipes with future app updates.

Smoking in Guided Cook mode is as easy as it gets. Simply select a food type and choose the weight from a sub-menu. The following screen displays a picture of the food, expected prep and cook time, ingredients, and directions for preparing the food and the smoker. The app walks you through things like applying rubs, removing excess fat and giblets from a chicken, and removing the membrane from a rack of ribs. It also tells you when to add wood chips to the firebox, when to put your food in the cabin once the smoker has had time to come up to temperature, where to place the meat probe, and when to hit the Start button. Unfortunately, the app lacks a Start button, which means you have to press the button on the smoker to get things started. More on this later.

The Manual Cooking mode lets you set target probe and cooking temperatures, but it doesn’t offer a timer function, at least not yet (it’s also on Char-Broil’s to-do list). Regardless of which mode you use, you’ll receive notifications on your smartphone, accompanied by a beep, that tells you when your food is almost done and when the cooking cycle has completed.

The app also offers a History page that displays recent cooking sessions by date. Tapping on a session allows you to add notes for future reference. The Settings page is where you go to update the firmware, rename your smoker, and reconfigure your network settings, and the Help page offers tips on setup, cooking, cleaning, and what the different light ring codes represent. Char-Broil’s website also offers a wealth of information about the smoker, with tips for cooking and preparing foods, as does the included Grilling Guide.

Setup and Performance
Setting up the smoker is easy. I washed and installed all of the shelving, plugged the smoker in, downloaded the iOS app, and created an account. Tapping the Configure Your Network icon on the Dashboard screen started the DADO light flashing and provided detailed instructions on how to connect to the smoker to my home Wi-Fi. Ten seconds after it was connected, the DADO light turned solid white, and the Dashboard informed me that the smoker was online.

I decided to start big by smoking a 7-pound pork shoulder dressed with a Kansas City rub. I selected the Pulled Pork recipe, entered the weight, and followed the on-screen instructions. First, I filled the smoker box to the top with apple wood chips, which are milder than hickory and mesquite, but still provide a hearty smoke flavoring. I also filled the water pan to the fill line to help keep the pork moist since it would be cooking for a little over 10 hours. I clicked Add, removed the meat probe, and began applying the rub while waiting for the wood chips to heat up. After 15 minutes I noticed that the Start button was flashing, and realized that I never hit it to begin the heating process (this is where a Start button on the app would come in handy). Once properly started, the smoker needed around 45 minutes to adequately heat the wood chips and bring the cabin up to 225 degrees. I was then instructed to place the meat in the smoker and insert the probe.

I was able to monitor the cabin temperature from the app, as well as current and targeted internal meat temperatures, and elapsed cooking time. After six and a half hours, I received a notification telling me that it was time to check my wood chips. I added a handful, noticed the water pan was empty, and filled it up again. Toward the end of the cooking cycle, I received a notification that the meat was almost done, and was prompted to check the internal temperature by moving the probe to another part of the shoulder. After another 30 minutes or so, the app informed me that the target probe temperature was reached and that the pork was done.

The shoulder was perfectly cooked, moist, and very tender. I was able to easily pull it using a pair of forks. The smoke flavoring was just right, too; not too heavy, but not too mild. Cleanup was relatively easy thanks to the removable shelving and drip tray, which I tossed in the dishwasher. A quick wipe with warm soap and water had the interior of the cabin and glass door looking like new.

I had similar results smoking a couple of salmon fillets and three racks of baby back ribs. Both had excellent smoke flavoring and were cooked to perfection. I only wish the app had reminders check the water level and to mop the ribs, which is something I do religiously every 30 minutes or so (I use a mixture of apple juice and apple cider vinegar). I also smoked some almonds using hickory wood chips, and they were outstanding; the nuts had a nice crunch and a rich smoky flavor that rivaled any store-bought nuts I’ve sampled.

Despite using an electric heating element, the smoker is relatively energy efficient, averaging around 750 watts of power. Using the average US cost of $0.12 per kWh, that works out to approximately $0.09 an hour, or just under a dollar for a 10-hour cooking cycle.

Conclusions
If you enjoy eating smoked food but don’t have the time to babysit a smoker for the better part of a day, add the Char-Broil Digital Electric Smoker with SmartChef Technology to your backyard cooking arsenal. Its $400 price is a bit high, but it produces perfectly cooked smoked fish, meats, nuts, and more, while freeing up your time to do more constructive things, like sit by the pool. While the app is very easy to use, it will be even more user-friendly once Char-Broil expands the recipe database and adds a timer to the Manual cook mode. However, neither gripe prevents the smoker from easily taking home our Editors’ Choice award.