If you take your barbeque seriously, you know that smoking meat for a long time at a low temperature yields the best results. However, low and slow cooking requires maintaining a constant temperature and an adequate supply of wood chips to give your food a nice smoky flavor. A feature-rich wood pellet grill like the Traeger Ironwood 650 gives you perfectly cooked set-it-and-forget-it food every time, but it’s a massive machine with a price to match. Enter the ASmoke Portable Pellet Grill AS300 ($299.99), a tabletop machine that lets you take your smoking game on the road. It uses all-natural wood pellets to smoke food, and it also roasts, grills, sears, and braises. The AS300 delivered tasty smoked food in testing, but it could use a few extra features including more precise temperature controls, a timer, and smart connectivity options.
Design and Features
Constructed of steel and stainless steel, the AS300 has a durable look and feel. The exterior chamber is matte black and the lid and legs come in four finishes: Apple Red, Cinder Black, Pine Green, or Tahoe Blue. The lid has a chrome handle and can be fastened to the chamber using two heavy-duty spring-loaded clamps. Inside is a hopper that holds up to four pounds of pellets, a 14-by-13-inch (WD) cooking rack, and a smaller 12.5-by-5.5-inch detachable upper rack.
At 17.5 by 24.8 by 14.4 inches (HWD), this grill will easily fit on a tailgate or picnic table, and its 45-pound weight is manageable as long as you don’t have to carry it too far. It offers a total of 256 square inches of cooking area, with the main grill providing 191 square inches of that space. That’s enough room to accommodate one rack of ribs, a good-sized chicken, eight burgers, or twelve hot dogs.
The AS300 grill uses the same type of auger drive and hot pot mechanisms used on the Traeger Ranger, Ironwood, and Timberline grills. Pellets drop from the hopper into the auger and are slowly fed into a hot pot with a heating rod where they are ignited and burned as fuel. A draft fan helps maintain an even temperature throughout the cooking chamber.
As with the Traeger Ranger, the AS300 is ideal for tailgating, camping, and other portable applications, but isn’t designed for 10-12 hour smoking sessions as the firepot becomes filled with ash and needs to be cleaned out. For marathon smoking sessions, you’ll be better off with a bigger model such as the Traeger Ironwood 650.
The front of the AS300 holds a temperature control dial, a small color LED panel, and a temperature probe port, and there’s a grease port on the right side. The grill comes with a probe, a main cooking rack, an upper cooking rack, a broiler plate and broiler slider, and a small grease bucket that hangs off the port on the side. The LED panel displays the current and set chamber temperature, and has a color gauge that tells you how close you are to your set temperature. It also has a No Pellet warning LED, as well as LEDS that tell you if the auger motor and fan are running.
A dial is used to turn the grill on and off and set the chamber temperature. The lowest setting, labeled Smoke, sets the temperature to 180 degrees Fahrenheit and the next setting is 200 degrees. After that it goes to 225, 250, 300, 350, 400, 450, 475, and High (500 degrees). You don’t get the precise temperature control that you get with the Traeger Ranger, which lets you set the temperature in 5-degree increments. You also don’t get any timers, preheating alerts, or warming modes on this grill. Moreover, the ASmoke is devoid of smart tech—it doesn’t offer Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connectivity, and it doesn’t have a mobile app. Everything is controlled manually at the dial.
ASmoke sells pellets for $29.99 for a 5-pound bag and $49.99 for a 20-pound bag, and as of this writing it only offer Apple wood pellets. That’s significantly more expensive than Traeger’s pellets, which generally go for $19 per 20-pound bag. Fortunately, you can use third-party pellets in the AS300 if you want to save some money and experiment with different smoke flavorings such as Cherry, Hickory, and Mesquite wood.
Installation and Performance
Preparing the ASmoke grill for first use was easy. It only took a few minutes for assembly, which consisted of attaching the lid handle and legs, installing the broiler plate and slider, and attaching the grease bucket. I set the grill up on my picnic table, plugged it into a GFCI outlet, filled the hopper with pellets, and set the temperature to Smoke.
It took the grill around four minutes to ignite, and another 10 minutes or so to come up to temp. I placed a couple of freshly caught Thresher steaks on the main grill and set the timer on my phone to 3.5 hours (this is where a built-in timer would come in handy). The AS300 stayed within 10 degrees of my target temperature (180 degrees), and when my timer went off I was rewarded with delicious shark steaks that were smoky and evenly cooked. A few days later I smoked two racks of baby back pork ribs for a total of six hours, and they too were perfectly cooked, smoky, and moist.
Conclusions
Whether you’re tailgating, camping, or just doing some backyard grilling, the ASmoke Portable Pellet Grill is small enough to fit on a tabletop and makes it easy to cook delicious food with a smoky wood-fired flavor. Simply fill the hopper with pellets, select your desired temperature, and relax while the AS300 maintains your ideal smoking, baking, or roasting temperature. You don’t get any smart features or timers with it, and temperature settings are somewhat limited, but it does a fantastic job of infusing a nice smoky flavor into whatever you’re cooking. That said, we slightly prefer the Traeger Ranger, which offers more precise temperature settings, a cooking timer, and a mode that keeps your food warm, but it costs $100 more.
If money is no object and you want to take your smoking skills to a professional level, check out the Traeger Ironwood 650, a big smoker that offers 650 square inches of cooking space. It’s outfitted with all the bells and whistles you can think of, including Wi-Fi connectivity, a multi-speed fan, a killer mobile app, and a huge library of recipes that can be programmed right into the grill.
