The Simple Smoker -
The Simple Smoker is a smoke-stack style device where everything sits inside a cylinder. It is 20.5"W x20.9"D x26.6"H when fully assembled and weighs 30.6 pounds. As this is an electric smoker there is a heating element that runs around the outside of the cooking chamber. The cooking chamber is a stainless steel tube with a concave end at the bottom. This end has a hole in it so all of the drippings drop down into a pan below. The chamber has a maximum temperature of 525 degrees Fahrenheit which gives it a fairly wide range of cooking options (you can cook up to a 16 pound turkey in this model).  

Inside this chamber sits the cooking basket which is the same height as the cooking chamber. The two removable half-shelves we talked about earlier are used here for move the position of your food or to give you space for extra items inside the smoker. There is also a secondary basket that sits on top of the primary one (just under the smoker lid). This is used for cooking vegetables or other side items that you want to have smoked as well. Because it is outside of the main cooking chamber it is not going to get the same amount of heat meaning it will cook slower but it will still get the smoke flavor. You can also use this for items that you want to cook at a lower temperature than you would get inside the main cooking chamber.

To get the smoker flavor the Char-broil Simple Smoker used a wedge-shaped basket that slides into the front. Once you place this inside, and tell the app, the Simple Smoker heats up the wood so that it starts smoking and released the smoke into the cooking chamber. The smoke rises up through the chamber to flavor the food (yes we know this is obvious…). For some reason Char-broil made the opening on this basket very small. We can see this becoming an issue when filling it up during cooking.

As we mentioned earlier in this review there is also a drip pan to catch the juices from any meat you are cooking. There is a small drawer for this on the back of the smoker that you can put in a disposable tray (or aluminum foil) for easy clean up and disposal.

Last, but certainly not least we find all of the brains for the Simple Smoker in the pedestal. Char-broil gives you a single large button with the Char-broil logo inside of the light ring. This ring flashes in different patterns and colors to let you know what is going on. To the right of this is a small button with three dots on it (…) there is a light above this with the numbers 1, 2, 3 this is for auto-preset cooking routines. You can use these to quickly get your food going if you do not have internet, or you just want to get things going. To use this feature you simple press the button with the three dots until the desired preset comes up.

Below this button is a small button that looks like a “d”. This is for network connectivity and is also used for firmware updates etc. The button will light up when it is online and connected to your network. It will flash when it is establishing a connection.

To left of all of this fun and buttons is a small port for the temperature probe. Not much you can really say about this; it is nice and clean, has a cover to protect the port from dust.

So now that we have told you all about the build of the Simple Smoker, let’s talk about the app that goes with it.