Smoking

Smoking is where the rest of the season's work gets its flavor. A hunter's smoker does different jobs from a backyard barbecue: long, low runs of jerky and snack sticks, summer sausage taken slowly up to a finish temperature, and the occasional bone-in ham or shoulder. Those jobs are decided by one spec that most pellet buyers never look at — how low the dial goes.

The minimum temperature is the spec that matters

Almost every pellet grill advertises its ceiling. For game, the floor is what counts. Pit Boss publishes a 130°F minimum on its Navigator vertical smokers and a 180°F minimum on its horizontal pellet grills — and that difference decides whether a machine can dry jerky at all. The USDA's guidance is to heat jerky meat to 160°F first and then dry it; a grill whose floor is 180°F cooks the strips instead, and you get brittle, over-rendered jerky rather than the pliable kind.

That is why the vertical smokers lead our pellet smoker ranking for venison and jerky and the horizontals sit below them, even where the horizontal is the better-built machine. It is also why a dedicated dehydrator is still the cheapest honest answer if jerky is the only thing you want to make — our dehydrator rankings cover that path.

Vertical or horizontal

A vertical pellet smoker is a cabinet of racks. You get far more rack area for the footprint — Pit Boss's verticals run from 1,118 to 2,224 square inches across five or six racks — which is exactly the shape of a jerky or snack-stick batch, where you are laying out many thin pieces rather than one big one. It will not sear.

A horizontal pellet grill is a barrel. Less rack area, but it sears, and it handles a whole bone-in ham or a shoulder better than a rack cabinet does. If the smoker also has to be the family grill, this is the one. Pit Boss's Sportsman line is the one it markets at hunters specifically, and its own copy for the Sportsman 850 names smoking jerky and grilling game among the jobs.

Where a smoker sits in the chain

A smoker does not replace anything upstream. You still break the animal down, still grind the trim, and still stuff and cure before anything goes in the cabinet. What changes is the finish: snack sticks and summer sausage that would otherwise finish in an oven or a dehydrator come out of a pellet smoker with real wood behind them, and both styles of jerky work on racks.

Cure still applies. Anything that spends hours in the 100-150°F range needs a nitrite cure in the mix, and the ratio is not a thing to eyeball — see the curing salt guide. A smoker's built-in probe tells you the air temperature and sometimes one meat temperature; it does not tell you that the thickest chub in the middle of the cabinet has reached its finish temperature, which is what a separate thermometer is for.

What we do and do not claim

We have not run these machines. Every figure on these pages — rack area, temperature range, hopper capacity, construction — is Pit Boss's own published number, cited on the page where we use it, and we have marked the places where the maker publishes nothing. Two of the four verticals, for instance, do not publish a temperature range at all, and we say so rather than assuming they match their siblings.

Prices on brand-direct products are Pit Boss's own list price with the date we read it, not a live feed and never a discount we inferred. Where the same machine also sells on Amazon, both buttons are on the card. We earn a commission either way, which is disclosed on every button and explained in full on our affiliate disclosure.