Listen, if you have the time and the passion to lovingly tend to a wood or coal fire, keeping the heat and smoke output just right as you low and slow smoke a rack of ribs, a whole turkey, or a slab of brisket to tender, savory perfection, you do your thing. Old school pit-style smoking yields some of the finest foods you’ll ever taste, after all.
But… here’s the thing: an automatically controlled pellet smoker that maintains a pre-programmed temperature and feeds in wood pellets as needed, keeping the heat and smoke flow in perfect balance while being entirely hands-off for the chef? That delivers some of the finest foods you’ll ever taste, too. I know because while I love some low and slow-cooked meats, I don’t have time for the classic hands-on approach, so I’ve turned to an auto pellet smoker myself.
The Z Grills Flagship 700D4E Pellet Grill & Smoker is a large, commanding piece of hardware that can accommodate whole birds (a single turkey or two or three chickens), two full racks of ribs, two dozen burgers, a good 40 to 50 hotdogs or sausages, and so on. It’s got a lot of cooking space—500 square inches of primary cook space and nearly 200 more on the top rack are the specifics.
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This advanced pellet smoker is also backed by a 100 percent money-back guarantee and a three-year warranty. Not bad, right?
Under all that cooking area is additional cabinet space where you can store bags of pellets, cooking tools, gloves, and cleaning supplies, or where you can stash condiments and plates and such when mealtime is near. Off to the left of the cooking space and tucked between it and the cabinet storage is where all of the magic happens.
Of course, in this case, it’s actually more about mechanics than magic. As in once you set the exact temperature you want via a digital display controlled with a simple dial, the grill will begin turning an auger that feeds just the right amount of wood pellets into its burn chamber to keep the heat even and the smoke constant. As long as you keep the offset hopper filled with pellets (and you can and should get creative here—cherry wood? Pecan? Mesquite?), which is easy to do as it can hold 20 pounds of pellets at once, yielding at least a five or six-hour smoke time when filled, and much longer at lower temps, you are all but guaranteed perfectly smoked foods.
Now, before you get there, you’ll of course have to assemble your 700D4E, and given the two large boxes it arrives in and the 50-plus separate components listed in the instruction manual, you might be expecting quite a challenge here. Don’t worry, you’ll be slow smoking in no time: I built this smoker, single-handed, in about 30 minutes. The hardest part by far was removing all the protective packaging, and I mean the hardest part writ large, because cooking with the thing? That’s a flip of a switch and a twist of a dial.
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