Best Smoker for Bacon – For Cold or Hot Smoking at Home

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When you’re looking the best smoker for making bacon. There are so many different ways of doing it, but I’m hopefully going to show you what I have found as the easiest way and some methods I’ve tried.

Glorious bacon can come in so many different forms, the absolute classic I love is the streaky bacon from the pork belly. But it just depends on what meat I’m getting, pork loin is also awesome, fat to meat ratio you’re looking for is the biggy – that’s why streaky is most people’s favorite.

I started off many years ago cooking the bacon on the lower temperatures (in essence cooked hot smoked bacon), and for the last 10 years have been doing dry-cured cold smoked bacon which sometimes I splice with pancetta Italian style as well. I’ll give you a rundown of the spices I use for this later on.

Ok here’s the quick answer summarized.

Best Smokers for Making Bacon

The best smoker for making hot smoked bacon are pellet grill, electric or gas smokers because of consistent heat. For cold smoked bacon maze or pellet tube smokers are easy to use and reliable.

For a straight link to this kit, I write about each of these below in different posts:

Hot Smoked Bacon Smokers, all of these are oven style smokers that cook at low temperatures, which is ideal for smoky cooked bacon. aka Low & Slow

• Pellet Grill Smokers (an investment) $$$
• Electric Smokers (relatively cost-effective)$$
• Gas Smokers (relatively cost-effective)$$

Cold Smoked Bacon Smokers

For me this is real bacon, hot smoked cooked bacon is ok, but in reality, it’s smoked pork belly ham.

• Pellet Tube Smokers & Maze Smokers (my favorites – cheap and effective)

As you probably know there are 2 main methods, you either use a low-temperature to cook the bacon through and give it some smoky flavor (basically a kind of cooked ham) or you fully cure the bacon and then apply a cold-smoked method.

I wrote a full rundown on making bacon for either way, you can find here.

Ok – so why these smokers.

All of these can run for 4-8 hours or a lot longer. Once they are set up and ready. It’s all pretty straightforward for mak’in bacon.

So ease of use is the biggest factor for me.

If your looking for the 'ducks nuts' (that means a very good bit of equipment). A smoke generator can be used as a cold smoker, or adding smoke to indirect cooking which equates to a form of 'low & slow' bbq or making smoked ham and some much more.

The inventor of smoke generators was Smokai, it's a simple device that uses the venturi effect and a variable air pump to control the amount of smoke you are pumping.

I have a range of cold smoking options, and the Smokai is my favorite.

 

By far the smokai is the most efficient cold smoker I've come across because you have control. 

It also burns very clean, which flavors the food exceptionally well. I've been using smoke generators for over 10 years, and this one is the ducks nuts.

Check out this review I did of the Smokai Smoke Generator here.

Best Hot Smoking Bacon Smokers

I’ve used a pellet tube smoker for both hot and cold smoking. For cooked hot smoked bacon I get the gas grill fired up, and just put the pellet tube inside.

Being a 5 burner BBQ I just had one gas burner turned on low, and did some indirect smoking under the hood at 190°F.

If you got a existing gas grill with the hood, this can be a really easy option to do some hot smoked bacon at home.

Electric or Gas Smokers

You can’t go wrong really with the electrical gas smoker like the ever-popular Masterbuilt smoker, if you want more details it’s an outdoor oven, with thermostat control and some area to burn wood inside. There are 100,000’s of these in backyards.

For $200-$250, you can basically get your full low & slow smoking done and make bacon with these bad boys. Plus, if you want to get a pellet tube smoker and you can cold smoke in it (you could get the official Masterbuilt cold smoke accessory, the pellet tube or maze tube will pretty much do the same thing without electricity, but it does have a higher level of convenience for a few hundred bucks.

Charcoal Smoker (Kettle, Offset, Drum etc)

You can definitely do your hot smoked bacon on a charcoal smoke, and get that charcoal kind of flavor. You got to be careful of that with charcoal, some of the ‘restaurant-quality’ charcoal that I’ve used is given off some pretty strong flavors.

The issue is it takes a bit more time and I find a bit more inconvenient to set up charcoal smoking, and controlling the temperature is always can be a little bit tougher with the charcoal smoker.

That’s why I prefer using electric, gas, pellet grill or pellet tube/maze smokers to get this making bacon job done in an easier way.

Best Cold Smoking Bacon Smokers

Without a doubt, my go-to is always the pellet tube smoker or smoke generator (for control), I guess I like to use a decent butane torch lighter to get this thing going, being a bit of a firebug this is the fun part.

Then to just blow out the smoldering pellets, and I have probably around 4 or 5 hours on cold smok’in. Where I live the humidity is high and night like in most places, the temperatures are low so nighttime is a good time to get the cold-smoked bacon underway.

And then in the morning, I just wrap or put the bacon in a container ready for another smoking session the next evening.

Cold Smoke Pancetta Bacon Recipe

Salt	2.50%
black peppercorns	0.40%
brown sugar	1.00%
juniper berries	0.40%
garlic cloves	1 per 1 lb
bay leaves (recipe fresh or dried)	1 per 1 lb
Fresh thyme sprigs	1 per 1 lb

I like to play around with these spices, they come through in a subtle way around these percentages, but you can play around with oregano, cinnamon or even nutmeg. Some of these spices lend themselves nicely to the braesola dry cured beef style as well.