gamblin_man's Full Review: Bradley Technologies BT1S1 Electric Smoker
We have enjoyed smoking meats and other things as a hobby for many years. Others seem to enjoy sharing the fruits of our labor. Our latest addition to the smoker family is the Original Bradley Smoker BT1S1. It joins the old standby two barrel smoker from Brinkman and another charcoal water smoker/grill we only use occasionally now. So why did we invest in a third smoker? In the following paragraphs we hope to help you understand.
Barbecue
Today many people think of meat slathered with a tomato based sauce when they think of barbecue. The official definition of barbecue, however, is cooking over an open flame, probably the very first cooking method of our distant ancestors. In the colonial days of America a barbecue was an event of major proportions. It was a gathering of neighbors that included lots of food and drink. A barbecue could last three or four days. Today a barbecue is usually a warm weather backyard event with cooking on a grill as the centerpiece. The two best known methods of preparing barbecue are grilling and smoking. Arguments abound around which is best and where the line between the two is drawn. Our definition is as follows.
Grilling
Grilling is a form of barbecue done over a hot fire. The goal is to quickly sear the outside of the cooking food to hold in the moisture. The flavor may include a little wood smoke, but mostly comes from the hot grease dripping and smoking on the hot fire. Starting temperatures of around 400 to 500 degrees sear the meat then the fire is cooled to allow fast cooking.
Smoking
The purest and oldest form of smoking does not cook, but rather, along with a cure, helps preserve the meat. Virginia hams and country hams are the best known reminders of this method. The ham must be cooked before eating. This is called cold smoking and is a long, drawn out process. The curing takes weeks and must be done at temperatures between 35 and 45 degrees. The smoking process takes more weeks and the food is held at temperatures between 85 and 100 degrees as the smoke permeates the meat and the low temperature dries it.
Smoke cooking actually imparts a smoke flavor to the food while it is cooked at low temperatures, around 100 degrees Celsius for several hours to prevent sealing the surface of the food and allow the heavy smoke of the fire to penetrate the surface. Jerky is a good example of this kind of smoking. In all cases hardwood is used to produce the smoke and often also to produce the heat.
The Bradley Smoker
Bradley Smokers were developed and are produced in Canada. The idea appears to have come from a method of smoking popular in the Pacific Northwest. There an old freezer or refrigerator is converted to allow heat and smoke to get inside it, and the meat, usually fish, is smoked in this manner. The Bradley smoker takes this idea and modernizes it, making it almost painless to produce fine smoked foods, either cold smoked or cook smoked.
This review is on the Bradley BT1S1 Smoker, the one they now call their original smoker. It is the bottom of their electric smoker lineup. You can move up to one with the outside of stainless steel rather than powder coated black metal. You can go farther and add digital controls to control the smoker with white powdered-coated steel exterior. They have one with all of this and taller to handle six racks instead of the four of the original.
Describing this smoker isn’t too hard. Think of a hotel room refrigerator to get a feel of its size. It even has a swing out door with a magnetic seal like the refrigerator. There are protruding slides for four shelves inside and four posts to hold a drip rack. It comes with another pan for the bottom and a stainless steel bowl for the water. At the lower back is a 500 watt infra red heating element that can be temperature controlled with a sliding rheostat at the front bottom outside. On the top is an opening with a rotating disc that controls how much smoke and heat is released during cooking. The smoke unit is a separate box that hangs from the side on two posts. It has a long thin plate that protrudes about a third of the way into the smoker box near the bottom. Sticking out of the box at the top is a cylindrical tube with a slotted opening. This tube holds the "bisquettes", the secret of the Bradley Smoker.
Specifications (From the Bradley Smoker website):
Weight - 40 lbs
Dimensions: 2.6 ft H x 2 ft W x 1.23 ft D
Construction Exterior: Powder Epoxy Steel
Construction Interior: Aluminium
Internal Cooking Vol: 2288 cu in
Internal Heater: 500 watt cooking element, 125 watt smoking element
Power: - 110 V, 50 - 60 Hz , - 5.5 Amps (240 Volt Model also available)
ETL Listed
Max Temperature: Controllable up to 160C.
Min Temp: subject to ambient see FAQs
Thermometer
Adjustable racks: 4
Warranty: 12 months
User Guide
Recipe Booklet
Bisquettes
The smoker uses special bisquettes made of various hardwoods to produce smoke. The bisquettes are placed in the tube and one is fed into the smoker every twenty minutes where it is burned using a separate 125 watt heating element. The burned bisquette is pushed into the water bowl as the new one takes its place. The tube will handle enough of these hardwood bisquettes to smoke continuously for over eight hours. There is a button on the front of the smoker box that will “prime” the smoker by cycling one bisquette at a time until the first one is pushed onto the heating plate. After that the cycle repeats automatically every twenty minutes.
Bradley has several different woods available for different tasks. They can be mixed in a single smoking session just by the order of placement, allowing some interesting variations in the final food taste and aroma. The varieties currently available are the most popular used by today’s smoke chefs. They include the popular hickory and mesquite (not a good choice for long smoking as a rule) as well as oak, alder (a favorite for salmon), apple, cherry, maple, pecan, and one they call special blend that has several varieties of wood in one bisquette. They come in packs of 48 (16 hours of smoke) or 120 (40 hours of smoke). They also have a sampler pack of 60 bisquettes for experimenting. A nice touch is that the cardboard bottom that holds each stack is also a recipe.
To operate you stack the wood bisquettes of your choice in the smoke tube, plug the cord (rating 5.5 amps) into any standard electrical outlet, flip on the main switch on the smoker box, and adjust the temperature slider. You will need to push the advance button three times to get the first briquette over the heating plate. Then you watch the temperature gauge centered in the upper part of the door until it reaches the temperature you want. Give this phase about an hour. If you want to conserve bisquettes, you can let the cycle advance them and the first one will begin to smoke about when the preheat phase is done. We preload the food onto the racks and slide them into the smoker box. The smoker comes with four chrome racks. If you are smoking thin items like jerky or baby ribs, you can get eight trays into the smoker by inverting every other one. Bradley also has non-stick coated small opening trays for jerky or other small foods that would fall through the larger spaces of the regular racks. We got these as well and use them a lot.
This smoker is advertised with over 2000 cubic inches of interior space. A practical limit is less than that volume of food. You could easily smoke a medium turkey and maybe some corn on the cob. Since the cost of the wood bisquettes makes the smoking cost around $1.00 to $1.50 an hour, it is a good idea to smoke a full load each time. Since the original purpose of smoking was not so much taste as food preservation, it will keep refrigerated for several weeks and frozen for six months or more. It reheats well.
Our Uses so far
One of the more difficult tasks on our other smokers is smoking cheese. This is a cold smoking preferred task so the cheese won’t melt. The Bradley does this job well and easily by just not turning on the main heating element. We have made jerky from hamburger that everyone seems to enjoy. We smoke turkey breasts (my honey’s favorite) and beef brisket for barbecue. We do pulled pork and pork chops. Summer sausage is a snap. Other sausages are only complicated by the need to stuff them into a casing. A whole roaster chicken really hits the spot when marinated properly. Salmon and other firm fleshed fish just seem to disappear as soon as they come out of the smoker. Bacon is still on our to do list.
One of the nice things is that you can put foods that need different smoking time in at different times or take the quicker cooking items out sooner just by placing the different foods on individual racks based on cooking time. All of the pieces in the smoker are dishwasher safe for pretty easy cleanup. You really don’t want to clean the inside of the smoker. The blacker it gets the better the food tastes. I remember when I lived in Kansas City and some people were wild about Arthur Bryant’s. They watched the newspaper for the periodic report that the health department had inspected the restaurant. They stayed away afterwards for a month or so until the pit got dirty again.
The outside cleans with soap and water. We got a fitted cover to allow us to leave it outside. We also made a cover for the briquette holder tube to allow us to smoke in the rain. Once the bisquettes get wet they become a soggy mess and are useless. We started with a can, but went to a piece of thin wall pipe with an end cap glued on.
Service After the Sale
The Bradley Smoker Company has a reputation for standing behind their products with service and parts. This is important for a product that should last many years. The warranty is twelve months. They have an active forum of users on their website so that information and ideas are freely available.
This became important to us as we had two part failures shortly after writing this review. In both cases we were easily able to troubleshoot to the faulty part level and called the Bradley toll-free number with that information to hand. The telephone was answered by a real person; no "voice jail". In both cases the part was quickly shipped to us with apologies, we were able to easily replace it, and were quickly back in business.
The second part failure, an internal short of the bisquette heater to the heating plate causing the GFCI outlet to trip when it was turned on, was a little more difficult to analyze. The helpful folk at Bradley were right there with troubleshooting help if we needed it.
We posted to the Bradley User Forum with concern that we had two part failures so early and were reassured by others just like us that this is an unusual occurrence.
Before updating this review to include information on the service quality of Bradley Smokers, we wondered what would have happened if we were unwilling or unable to troubleshoot and repair it ourself. We emailed their info address, available on their website, and received a response within a couple of hours. Rather than try to paraphrase a very succint and helpful response, we requested and received permission to quote the relevant part.
"Thankfully repair on the products is fairly simple and most users are prepared to do repairs themselves. Our customer service representatives do a fantastic job of helping our customers get to smoking. If by chance a customer cannot fix, or, does not want to fix a broken smoker they can take the smoker to any appliance repair service company (there are still some around), and get the unit fixed by them. They may have to order parts but that is not an issue. If it is covered under warranty we would pay the repair service company.
Yours truly,
Wade Bradley"
Even with the "infant failures", which can happen, the support and service quality allow us to keep the rating at five full stars. (update 11/21/2006)
The Bottom Line
The main reason we added this smoker to our arsenal is its versatility and ease of use. It is not a set and forget cooker, but it is much less time intensive to manage than the other two. No requirements to get charcoal burning or wood chips soaked adds to the ease of use. Not having to worry about a propane bottle getting empty in the middle of a ten hour smoking marathon led us to the electric. Ease of cleanup afterwards is another major plus. Just take the racks in with the food still on them and slip them in the dishwasher after they are emptied.
One disadvantage of any water smoker is that if you are smoke drying foods like jerky, the water vapor makes it more difficult. An advantage, however, is that you can add spices to the water to add subtle flavors to the surface of the food.
We use this smoker almost exclusively for just the family now. We only fire up the big gun for the colonial style barbecue and almost never use the charcoal fired water smoker. There are a few downsides. The first that comes to mind is the expense and difficulty in finding the bisquettes. We order them over the internet from the lowest purveyor. Another is the inability to use really hot cooking. The upper temperature is limited to 160 degrees Celsius. In practice this can only be reached on a pretty warm summer day. In the winter months (yes, we smoke year round) it is pushing to get it over 100 degrees Celsius. Even at the higher temperatures the outside stays cool to the touch thanks to a blanket of insulation between the outer steel walls and the inner aluminum walls.
You can’t smoke a whole hog in this smoker, but a whole pork shoulder is easily in its grasp. There is plenty of room for lots of good food at each smoking session. All in all, since we knew the cost of bisquettes going in, we find the Smoker and the Bradley Smoker Company to be a five star experience.
Free Shipping! Authorized Bradley Smoker Dealer. The Bradley Smoker Original Smoker is a unique smoke house, sold complete with a smoke generator. Fla...More at Barbecue Grill Guide
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