When it comes to meat the various Minions of Breach Bang Clear all agree it tastes best when a fire is involved.

Meat. *snicker*

For me, I have played around with propane, charcoal, wood and most recently a pellet smoker. I like to keep an eye out for better ways to prepare the charred flesh of something that once had a parent.

I picked up a Camp Chef SmokePro DLX after checking one out at SHOT Show this year because I wanted to step up my meat cooking to the next level over my current standard a BioLite BaseCamp. There were a couple of key features that interested me. First was its ability to hold a temperature, effectively making it a wood powered oven. Another feature, and one that made it stand out from many other smokers on the market is the additional sear box you can order. This element of the SmokePro DLX allows you to pump your meat full of smoke (*giggle*) and then slap it on the sear box to get a nice crust on it.

I will ordering this, and writing about it  once I’m actually home for a few minutes to put an order in.

The Camp Chef SmokePro DLX.

Don’t know what a pellet smoker is? Here’s a quick rundown. It’s fueled by compressed hardwood pellets much like what you would put in a pellet stove to heat your home. These are loaded into a hopper. You select a temperature like on an oven and the thermocouples (fancy science things inside the barbecue that read temperature) talk to the computer and say, not hot enough, eh? It then turns the auger at the bottom of the hopper and loads pellets into the firebox. Once the fire gets to temperature it says, that’s good enough dude, no more and stops feeding the pellets.However, it does continually monitor the temperature.

What this gets you is a barbecue that holds its temperature and doesn’t have crazy hot spots. Thus you can basically set it and forget it, at lease for at time.

The SmokePro is extremely well made and was a cinch to assemble. It is a two man or one Hodor lift though to get it to your deck.

From my initial use and a comparison to feedback from a couple friends who own Traegers,  one thing I was particularly happy to notice about the SmokePro is that goes 100° F higher than their Traegers. This opens up a few more cooking options. I also noticed that the Low and High smoke settings produced more smoke than theirs did, which from the literature appears to be because it doesn’t try to keep the temperature as tight while forcing wood in.

The first of many pork loins cooked.  Subsequent ones had even better smoke rings this one was kind of rushed but still drool-worthy. 

So far we have prepared chicken, asparagus, pizza, and pork with this. I’m finding new reasons to use it all the time. All I can say is, this barbecue is basically cheating. It takes no real effort to make delicious meat, giving you more time to pretend you’re doing something important while drinking beers or a mojito made with fresh peppermint from your garden.

Or an Old Fashioned, which is, of course, the official drink of our Minions and House Morningwood.

With the SmokePro I also got a jerky rack. I’m highly anticipating that to be a game changer. Having swapped to the Ketogenic (low carb high fat and protein) lifestyle a year ago with awesome results, hiking meals have been kind of lackluster. No one makes low carb hiking meals. Mountain House used to have a buffalo chicken package, that was great, but it is now discontinued.

Because of that, nuts, jerky and protein bars has largely filled my diet on the trail.

More on this soon. I plan to on put more animals on this grill than man Noah did on his ark.