Kosher Food and Drink

Frequent readers will be familiar with my love of smoked foods, and it’s shared amongst my family. When we moved to Houston, my kids immediately started badgering me to get back into the smoking game almost the first day we got into our new house – apparently life without smoked brisket is hardly worth living. The reconstitution of my smoker fleet was thus a top priority.

While I know that opinions might differ, my personal halachic practice is to not smoke fish and meat in the same smoker. Smoking is messy, and cleaning up adequately is difficult. Since I love smoking fish, this means that I need two smokers: one for fish, and one for meat.

I previously used a Camp Chef Smoke Vault gas smoker for fish. The Smoke Vault is really not a bad smoker, but it suffers from the temperature control issues generally associated with gas smokers. Let me explain: gas smokers use propane for heat, and then smolder/burn wood chips for smoke. Since the smoke requires what is essentially a different fuel source than the heat, you wind up with the burning wood chips raising the temperature of the chamber in addition to the gas. Since smoldering wood chips don’t really produce heat in a very consistent fashion, you wind up with problems controlling the temperature, especially as they burn up.

Electric smokers have a similar issue – electricity for heat, chips/pellets for smoke. The difference is that electric smokers can use thermostats and PID controllers to adjust the electric heat to compensate in real time for the heat being produced by the smoking wood. Counter-intuitively, this means that electric smokers will often give better results than gas smokers, so long as you’ve got somewhere to plug it in. Neither gas nor electric is going to give you the same deep flavor that an offset stick burner (or even pellet or charcoal) would, but fish doesn’t often require a heavy smoke to take in that flavor.

Anyways, this time around, I decided I was going to try something totally different. I briefly considered gravity-fed charcoal, but found a pretty good deal on the General Electric Indoor Smoker (GEIS). The GEIS is basically an electric smoker that burns pellets for smoke… and can be used indoors. Yes, indoors. It uses what is essentially a catalytic converter to prevent smoke from escaping into your house. It is about the size of a microwave turned on its side, which isn’t small, but is also not excessively large.

It came in a large box, and was fairly easy to set up. The GEIS does have a network app if you’re into that, but you can also run it entirely disconnected. I did find the app useful for getting pinged that it was close to done with a cook and otherwise remotely monitoring the situation while working in another room. As an aside, if you’re running Home Assistant, this is one of the few GE devices that isn’t supported for automations (no entities are presented for interaction).

Cooking in the GEIS is super simple: put in your settings, fill the water pan, put in some pellets, and hit start. It’ll pre-heat to the desired chamber temperature, and beep you when it’s ready for you to put your food in. At that point, you put in the food, close the door, hit start again, and wait for your food to finish cooking in a smokey paradise. If you need to access your food in the middle of a cook, you can do that, but you’ll need to wait about ten minutes for the smoke to clear (there is a button you can press to do this). It is quite possibly the most fool-proof smoker I’ve ever used, which is good for something that is going to be in your house.

Let me confirm that the GEIS absolutely delivers on its promise of smoke-free indoor cooking. If you’re within a few feet of it, you’ll smell a faint whiff of wood smoke scent. But no actual smoke escapes, and it doesn’t make your whole house smell like wood smoke, either. (I was slightly disappointed by this; I was hoping my first floor would smell like Izzy’s Brooklyn Smokehouse at dinner time.)

But how is it as a smoker? Surprisingly, maybe shockingly, good. The chamber fills with pellet smoke pretty fast, and while it’s not super dense, it’s also clearly there putting good clean smoke on your food. It is about the same level of smoke I’ve gotten from my Camp Chef Woodwind. As noted above, it’s not going to compete with a dedicated outdoor option for delivering heavy smoke. However, it was more than adequate for getting my fish to taste like smoked fish. I also suspect it has superior consistency in terms of temperature to many cheaper outdoor options.

One feature that I thought was particularly great is the native wired probe port. The GEIS lets you cook to probe temperature, so you don’t even have to know how long the food will take to cook – just set the chamber temperature and the target probe temperature and let it ride.

While it’s early days yet, I’ve done salmon, bass, corn on the cob, and carrots in the GEIS, and they’ve all turned out excellent. The only real critiques I have:

1. I wish it could go below 170f during a smoke. I’m guessing this is a lawyer-driven requirement, but being able to go all the way down to 150f-160f for salmon would be phenomenal.
2. The interior space is limited – you won’t be putting more than about a side and a half of salmon into it at a time (cut into half side pieces). On the other hand, the convenience factor makes it pretty easy to do batches for larger quantities.
3. The built-in recipes are… questionable. The GEIS is a real smoker, and if you’re good with a smoker already, trust your instincts. I ignored the salmon preset and cooked it at 175f to a probe temperature of 135f, and it was delicious.

Clean-up is similarly trivial once the smoke is cleared. Just empty out the water pan (which will have some ash and partially burned pellets in it – dump it in the backyard) and clean the grates and drip tray. Done!

Let’s talk about a few of the things I’ve made in the GEIS:

• Salmon is, as always, king of the show. When cooked to probe temperature as I suggest, it is juicy, flavorful, and perfectly tender. I usually do minimalist spicing with some seasoned salt and pepper. My daughter will sometimes come home from a shopping trip with my wife bearing a side of salmon that she wants smoked. It also does a really solid job with the frozen pieces of salmon you get from Costco.
• The frozen Costco Chilean sea bass (with hechsher!) have also come out terrific with a similar cooking style. You’ll want to cook them to a higher internal temperature, though.
• Veggies also do pretty well, but the mechanics of being able to test texture and tenderness really make them more suitable for a less-sealed smoker that’s easier to open.

Unless you’re in an apartment, I would not suggest buying a GEIS as your primary smoker, and, indeed, I did get a monster gravity-fed charcoal smoker for smoking meat. However, as a secondary smoker for paerve items, I found the GEIS did exceedingly well. I also suspect that, unlike a large, imposing outdoor smoker, the GEIS might be be less intimidating for a skeptical spouse to use when the BBQ king/queen of the house is not around to do the work.