Bradley Smokers

A new product for us is the Bradley Smoker.

Whilst I enjoy smoked meats and cheeses I have never smoked food before (or had any interest in doing so).  That is until Bevis Smythe, Director of Allstar Products called in a few week ago to see if we would be interested in stocking Bradley Smoker products.

The picture he portrayed of delicious smoked foods easily and cleanly done at home kind of had my interest.

We ordered our smokers -

• Bradley Bench top - no longer available
• Bradley Original
• Bradley 4 Rack Digital
• Bradley 6 Rack Digital
• along with accessories and a few varieties of smoking bisquettes

Being believers in honestly being able to talk about a product rather than just parrot of all the sales hype we ordered ourselves a practice/demo model.  Our model of choice was the Bradley 4 Rack Digital model as this is the medium size smoker and we thought it would give us a good idea of smoking versatility.  Being the digital model meant we didn't have to be constantly watching the smoker and could pretty much just let it do its stuff.

Bevis came to Downs Heating, Cooling & Outdoors to provide some much needed training on the smokers as none of us had any experience.  He spent a couple of hours with us explaining how and why the systems work so well, the differences between the models available and talked about options like the cold smoker adapter for cheeses and other foods where you don't want heat involved

 

He had me at the ease of cleaning, all parts that need washing are dishwasher safe, he impressed me with the customer service policy of Bradley should there be a problem and when he promised to send me up some of his own smoked cheese well what's a girl to say!!

After he left we couldn't wait to try the smoker for ourselves but it first had to be seasoned.  We did this according to the instruction manual which was simply unpacking and assembling the smoker components (not much to do here and we had already done that to set up the instore display models) then putting the 1/2 filled water bowl (for extinguishing the spent bisquettes and collecting the residue).  We then had the smoker running for a while to get rid of the manufacturer smell and give the smoker a bit of a starting base.

It was to late to continue any further that afternoon so I had to put my enthusiasm on hold for the day, though I did run of to Bilo and bought some sausages (nothing special just plain medium thickness home brand ones) and some beef mince to make some beef balls.

 

This morning I set the smoker to 250 ° F, the display can be read either as Fahrenheit or Celsius (the instructions I had read said Fahrenheit so being inexperienced I just went with that) and preheated the unit.  Once it was close to temperature (I couldn't wait any longer, anticipation had kicked in) I placed about 10 sausages on the middle rack, put 4 whole corms of garlic in and set the smoker timer for 85 minutes and the cooking timer for a total 2 hours.

The aromas wafting through the front door at the shop here were incredible so Christine and I just had to go and peek inside to see what was happening - the food looked amazing.  We waited another 10 minutes and the smells were just getting harder and harder to resist so we decided to 'check' a sausage, it was cooked so that meant we had no choice but to taste test.

Like 2 naughty girls we sliced the sausage while no one was watching and popped a bit each into our mouths, we just looked at each other once the flavors hit our tastebuds - OH MY GOODNESS that was soooo yummy.  We decided then that although the sausages had only cooked for 1 hr 10 minutes they were done and could come off.  The meat balls we left for another 10 minutes then we took them off along with the garlic for more taste testing.

We had a couple of customers come in for other things and managed to tempt them into trying our first smoking efforts.  The first man needed a little prompt to taste test but once he had taken the first bite he was hooked, the second needed little tempting as he enjoys smoked foods so was willing to have a go.  I must admit I have never seen grown men looking so longingly at food and I'm sure had we not been watching the whole plate of food would have gone with them out the door.

We are now devoted smokers.