Stainless Steel Roughneck Smoker

Observations from a Kamado user who wanted to level up.

Temperature control is excellent. Firebox and lighting a fire are excellent. Be prepared to sit on the ground a lot though. Airflow is excellent. I cooked some cheap beef back ribs to start out. After seeing the airflow and smoke I can see that things are going to cook quicker. This can be good and bad depending on the bark creation and how slow you want to go. Build quality is excellent. Lots of sharp edges so be careful grabbing things and wiping things down. Stainless steel seems like it will be very easy to maintain and it looks excellent. Heat deflector is very good. After the first cook I’ve noticed there will be a lot of cleanup required in this cooker vs my kamado which just accumulated and evaporated fats and smoke. Excited to try some better meats in here. Hopefully I will be able to achieve better bark than my kamado which was lacking due to minimal airflow. For a backyard cooker I don’t know how it can get much better. Small footprint, easy to use, built to last and air tight. I gave up on an offset to go to this. Hopefully the quality of food will be close and operstion will be cheaper and easier.

Oh, shutting of the air sniffs the fire and temp very quickly.

This thing is built exceptionally well, it exceeded my expectations on build quality. I’ve only smoked a turkey breast so far, but it was the best turkey I’ve ever done.

Great design, handcrafted to the max. Fit and finish is exemplary. Done a couple of cooks on it, delish. Tweeks are using a Vortex sitting on the lower grates. While inverted I grilled a bunch of hamburger patties on the top grates. Small cone up and it becomes a searing station. Will be adding a Thermoworks Billows rig, mounted using their 1.5" adapter and locked into a 2" hole on a S/S dog bowl. 3.5" S/S bolt replaces one existing daisy wheel/bolt.

Bought corteen steel roughneck barrel smoker for my husband. He loves to smoke and has always made his own barrel smoker. They worked good but the one from Hasty Bake is amazing. The meat smokes beautifully and moist. He's smokin..best gift I have ever bought for the man who deserves nothing but the best.

I have used it a couple of times now. Once for some brisket and ribs and the second time for some pork butts. I recommend you use a meat thermometer since I almost overcooked the brisket. It was a small cut, really the leaner part of a large brisket, and it cooked much faster than I expected. It was on the lower shelf with the ribs up top. It did turn out OK, but not as juicy as I like. If you need a long cook time, you'll really want to load up the charcoal in the fire box. Both times I thought I had enough, but had to add more to finish cooking. There was some wind for the first cook, but not so much on the second. I'm still figuring out how much lump charcoal to add. I suppose you can just pack the box and then you'll always have enough, but lump charcoal isn't cheap and I hate to waste what I don't need. Overall this is a great smoker. It does what Hasty Bake says it will do and I really like the fact it's stainless steel. The rusted look just isn't for me. One more note - when removing the screws from the palate I noticed they were very hard to remove and all wonky, if that makes sense. What had happened is they used sheetrock screws much longer than needed for the small amount of wood in the palate. When the forklift picked up the palate the tines of the lift bent the screws sticking through on the other side. Making them hard to remove with my drill driver. Had to cut a couple with some large lineman's pliers. The wrapping and shipping of the smoker was great, only hard part was removing those darn screws!