Should You Smoke Indoors?

My ears always perk up a bit when I run across something original for the kitchen. An internal thought process goes from something like there's probably a good reason why no one has ever done this before to how has no one ever done this before?

Devices that allow you to do a bit of smoking while indoors pop up every few years, and often end up being a bit too impractical to make many waves, or fun but very niche.

It’s easy to understand why manufacturers try. From nuts to cheese to ribs and brisket, people go nuts for smoked food. Moving things indoors does really practical things like letting those same people come in from the rain or snow on a cold day. Unfortunately, some indoor smokers can set your smoke alarm off with relationship-damaging frequency. Others simply don’t work very well.

Those very thoughts ran through my brain when I heard about a new electric indoor smoker from GE Profile which I called in to test. Should we be smoking indoors? This oven had just enough promise to make me wonder if it might be worth one more try.

The first thing I discovered is that the GE Profile Smart Indoor Smoker (aka The Smart Indoor Pellet Smoker) is a honker at 16.25 inches high by 16.5 wide and 20.35 deep. It was easily the largest appliance on my kitchen counter, about twice the size of my microwave, Sparky Jr., whose spot it took. (Sparky took its temporary placement on top of the cooler like a champ.)

Opening the door reveals a cavity roughly a foot deep, a foot high, and eight inches wide. Small for a built-in oven, very small for a smoker, but hey, it's in my kitchen and not out on my cold, wet deck in Seattle. You feed standard barbecue wood pellets into a little hopper on the top, they drop into the interior and get toasty, then fall into a metal "waste bin" that's half filled with water, ensuring they are properly extinguished. There's a well laid out control panel on the front. A not-too-fussy mobile app gives you a degree of remote control if you want that. The temperature range of the smoker is 175 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit, a bit too low to allow it to pinch hit as a (non-smoking) countertop oven, which would be nice. It’s also important to state up-front that it retails for $1,000, though the price fluctuates a lot and has dipped as low as $500 at times.

I started by making wings from the When Southern Women Cook cookbook, because wings are fun and the book is fantastic. After coating a couple pounds of them in spices, I learned more about how the smoker works. The appliance’s tall and narrow design means you place the food directly on the interior racks, the juices falling into a drip pan at the bottom. On an outdoor smoker or grill, you cook food right on the grates, but in an oven, you almost never cook right on the rack, so this felt peculiar, but not necessarily bad. To keep that grill-versus-oven comparison rolling for a moment, I also liked the ability to simply set the GE to a temperature just like an oven. How civilized! The wings were delicious, if not terribly smoky, and cleaning up wasn't too bad; I just wiped the racks and drip tray down and popped them into the dishwasher.

Next, I smoked some salmon, realizing that inch-wide portions I made weren't going to fly on the rack, so I set them on parchment paper. This taught me to to start with the racks outside the oven, load them up, then put them in once it's preheated. Really, you'll want to buy three eighth-sheet pans and racks so you don't have to fuss with the oven racks. The salmon came out well.

Right off the bat, it was an exceedingly convenient way to smoke food, with no fire to build, maintain, or fuss over. It's kind of like a bulky low-temp countertop oven with special powers that allow you to do other things while it does its thing. One night I felt like putting a smoky spin on a favorite cannellini bean dip, and I could try it out without building a fire and babysitting the whole process. I pretty much just put the beans in, hit start, and walked away.

I was finding, however, that the food coming out of this smoker wasn't all that smoky, even when the device was maxed out on the highest smokiness setting. Perhaps related, I'd often find that it gave the food more the smell of smoke than the taste. I also consistently noticed that a near majority of the pellets that accumulated in the waste bin were not burned, or at least not very. The machine didn’t seem to gobble them up too quickly, but it certainly seemed wasteful considering how few of them were a dark enough color to have been able to emit appreciable smoke.

Still! I kinda liked it. I could be lazy, still smoke some food, and get a nice dinner out of it. I didn't have to go outside, lug the whole grill kit out to the deck, remove the wet cover from the grill, and stand outside in the rain. I could just hit a button in my kitchen and do other things while it cooked.

Later, I seared a yogurt-marinated pork loin on my stove, and finished it in the smoker, roughly guided by a recipe from Vishwesh Bhatt's fantastic 2022 cookbook I Am From Here to excellent effect, getting a nice sear in my cast-iron before transferring to a low temperature smoker where it could coast to a finish and pick up some pleasant smokiness.

The biggest piece of food I cooked in it was the last one, a 3.5-pound pork butt for pulled pork sandwiches. Following an America’s Test Kitchen recipe I brined the butt in a salt and sugar solution for hours in my fridge before coating it with yellow mustard, black pepper, and paprika. I left liquid smoke out of the brine to better assess how much smokiness was imparted by the smoker.

For reasons that probably revolve around making sure the pork finishes in a timely manner and avoiding the internal temperature plateau known as "the stall," the GE Profile's recipe has you wrap the pork in foil once it hits 160 degrees Fahrenheit. This is a peculiar way to finish cooking a pork butt as it robs the cut of a crispy bark (exterior), but that's probably OK in a setup like this which is not designed for smoking perfection but for scratching the itch when you can't or don't want to smoke outdoors.

After a long cook like this, I was curious to note how my house smelled. I'd heard reports of the GE being a bit too smoky smelling to use indoors, but the catalyzer it uses works well enough that there was only what you might call an “appetizing but not overpowering aroma” in the house.

Space is the key with setups like these and here is where we run into trouble, particularly revolving around where to put something like this. Unless your kitchen is enormous and you have more countertop acreage than you know what to do with, it feels like the best place for this would be on a garage shelf. (If I stuck the oven out there, though, I'd probably want it to be larger.)

In my 1,200 square-foot townhouse, which has no garage, I can't puzzle it out. It's fine on the countertop until I remember my microwave has been displaced, and Sparky Jr.'s having none of that, at which point the smoker gets the boot.

Even with something as innovative as this indoor smoker, smoking indoors might still be a little too impractical for most people. This one in particular isn’t too niche, it’s just too big for a lot of home kitchens.

If, however, you've read all of this, considered its limitations, and have between 500 and 1,000 clams to spend on it and think, I've got space for that, go for it. The rest of us, though, might just want to wait until the weather gets a little warmer.