Before making your first pellet grill purchase, you can benefit from the knowledge of how one operates.
How does a pellet grill work? What are its primary components, and how has it evolved over the years?
We shall dissect the most basic pellet grill into its components for a broader approach to these topics. In addition, we will list down all the processes involved and improvements made to date.
What Is a Pellet Grill?
For those new to backyard barbecues, you might be confused when hearing the term “pellet grill” for the first time.
Like many grills, the pellet grill is an outdoor cooking apparatus with a typically all-metal construction. However, its primary fuel source is wood pellets, and it uses an enclosed cooking chamber that maintains a preset temperature.
Since the wood pellets won’t ignite independently, modern pellet grills use a secondary fuel source for ignition, such as electricity, natural gas, or propane.
A pellet grill’s principal function is for smoking, a process that cooks, preserves, and adds flavor to food by exposure to smoke from burning. Nevertheless, countless innovations have made them more versatile, with expandable functions, including convection cooking, baking, open-flame grilling, and others.
How Does a Pellet Grill Work?
Since many of today’s popular pellet grills offer plenty of functions and features, they can be pretty tricky to grasp.
To understand how a pellet grill works, we shall look at the time of its inception. After understanding the basics, we can dive deep into some more technical, complicated, or peripheral functions.
History of the Pellet Grill
Compressed sawdust pellets have been around since the 1970s, and people used them as an alternative fuel source following the 1973 oil crisis.
Initially, people needed wood pellets for pellet burners, which were widely used for heating interiors. Aside from providing heat into homes and workplaces, innovators thought of devices that could employ the same design for cooking food.
In 1985, the first-ever pellet grill went into mass production, but its technology remained stagnant probably because of a patent that prevented competition for 20 years.
How Did the First Pellet Grills Function?
The first pellet smokers typically had horizontal cylindrical cooking chambers with a firebox attached to one end and an exhaust vent on the other. While the cooking chamber’s entire upper half unfurls as its lid, only a portion of the firebox’s upper surface opens for manual fuel input.
So, how does a pellet grill work?
The firebox is a shorter and smaller diameter cylinder that keeps a small fire burning using a tightly controlled oxygen intake. Since the firebox’s upper side connects to the cooking chamber’s bottom side, this type of pellet grill is more popularly known as an offset smoker.
Heat and smoke rise from embers in the firebox and flow into the bottom area of the cooking chamber through a transfer pipe. From there, the smoke and heat travel around a metal grate until they reach the opposite end. At this point, the heat cooks the food while the smoke adds exquisite flavors.
Finally, the heat and smoke escape through an exhaust vent at the opposite top end of the cooking chamber. With the controlled airflow, fuel consumption stays almost constant, resulting in a consistent cooking temperature.
Types of Food Smoking
Food smoking techniques date back farther than 10,000 years B.C. Early hunters and settlers discovered that various meats last much longer when exposed to smoke from burning firewood. They also found that meat exposed to woodfire smoke tends to have better flavors depending on the type of wood.
Today, developments in the culinary arts have produced various types of preparing and preserving food through smoking. These types include cold smoking, warm smoking, hot smoking, liquid smoking, and smoke roasting.
Among these methods, warm smoking, hot smoking, and smoke roasting are the most common methods used by a pellet grill.
Open-Air Vs. Enclosed Chambers
With open-air smoking, uncontrollable temperature changes lead to inconsistent results. For this reason, innovators found it necessary to smoke food in controlled environments, and the pellet grill made this possible.
Over the years, enclosed-chamber smoking led to the discovery of recommended smoking temperatures and durations for desired results. Each type of food or meat requires unique presets, and a pellet grill offers different cooking areas that allow you to cook different foods simultaneously.
Wood For Food Smoking
As you learn the ropes of using a pellet grill, you will come across different types of wood pellets.
An essential detail you have to keep in mind is to avoid burning softwoods to smoke your food. Softwoods, such as firs and pines, contain many resin particles, which are solid or highly viscous substances that turn into bitter soot when burned.
Every time you purchase fuel for your pellet grill, you will find hardwood pellets in sealed bags. Hardwood pellets may comprise wood from hickory, oak, alder, maple, mesquite, pecan, walnut, apple, cherry, peach, or pear trees.
These wood types primarily contain cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin, all essential for flavor and aroma.
While softwoods also have the same composition, hardwoods do not have undesirable resin ducts. Both cellulose and hemicellulose are types of sugars that effectively caramelize and produce fruity, flowery, and sweet aromas when burned.
On the other hand, lignin, when burned, turns into smoky, savory, and spicy compounds.
New Trends In Pellet Grill Smoking
Developments in mechanization have made it possible for modern pellet grills to carry convenient components. A modern pellet grill comprises a pellet hopper, a hopper motor, an auger, a firebox, a cooking chamber, a control panel, and an exhaust vent.
The hopper holds the pellets, and the motor rotates the auger to feed the pellets into the firebox. Of course, the control panel instructs the auger when to feed the wood pellets into the firebox to reach and sustain a preset cooking temperature.
This controller contains built-in thermostats that program commands for when to increase or reduce heat from the firebox.
Convenient Components
Pellet hoppers enable modern pellet grills to have the firebox embedded into the cooking chamber depending on the length and efficiency of the auger bit.
As a result, newer models can now provide the versatility of a combined set of outdoor cooking tools. Aside from automatic pellet feeding, the latest pellet grills also have built-in igniters to set the pellets on fire.
Unlike manual ignition in older offset smokers, a modern pellet grill allows you to start food smoking with just a touch of a switch. Additionally, some pellet grills have a built-in fan for feeding air into the fire and aiding in cooking performance.
Other convenient components include:
- A grease collection bucket
- An ash cleanout system
- Side shelves
- A hopper purging system
Multiple Cooking Zones
In older pellet grill models, you will most likely have to discover which type of food to cook in a particular cooking chamber area. Newer models will have specific recommendations of which parts to use for smoking, direct-flame grilling, and food warming.
More Pellet Grill Extras
Other features of new pellet grills include temperature probes, remote controllability through WiFi, alarms, and purchasable attachments. The temperature probes inform you of real-time temperatures within your food, and WiFi features let you read temperature scans on your mobile device.
Enjoy Cooking With Your Pellet Grill!
Now that you have a detailed understanding of how pellet grills work, you might be wondering why they cost more than other outdoor cooking tools. The short answer is that new pellet grill models offer the versatility of several BBQ cooking tools combined. With it, you can cook your heart out to create richly flavored smoked foods.