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SmartFire: Why it makes our BBQ life easier

SmartFire BBQ

UPDATE: There is a brand new version of the Smartfire, you can find the new Smartfire BBQ Controller 5.0 here!

I finally got my hands on a SmartFire BBQ earlier this year, both Clint and Scott in the RAS Crew have been cooking with them for over a year and have been pushing me to get one and Clint always said, “If I didn’t have the SmartFire, I would have given up Low and Slow Cooking a long time ago”. I finally caved and I am so glad that I did!

So what’s a SmartFire? It’s a devices that monitors and controls your BBQ Smoker from your phone. It helps regulate the BBQ temperature on your behalf by automatically controlling the smoker airflow supply so you aren’t up all day/night adjusting vents. 

It has basically given me the ability to start cooking proper barbecue without committing my whole day towards watching temps, adjusting vents, and so on. I have two young kids, work full-time, I can’t spend the whole day cooking up ribs or brisket, and I do love eating ribs!

My cook ups go like this now:

  1. Prep my meat; trim and rub.
  2. Setup my SmartFire on the Fornetto Razzo, kick off the App.
  3. Get fuel into my Fornetto Razzo, kick off a chimney to get the fire started.
  4. Get the fire settled and the Fornetto Razzo stacked back together with the SmartFire probes looped through.
  5. Drop my meat in, connect the probes, and then just wait for the alarm to tell me to wrap the meat.

You get the drift, within an hour I can get my meat prepped, temp up, and maintained in the smoker and my meat on! Don’t get me wrong, I do watch the App occasionally but this is from the comfort of my house, when I am down at the Woollies or once even at the beach. I go into more detail on what I have learned cooking with Razzo further down this post.

I won’t go too much into the technical details but if you want to see a great walk-thru on the SmartFire check out The Flying Kiwi on YouTube, this was the final step in my decision-making process, he nails it, there is no point me getting into it but what I will get into is how I found using the SmartFire on my Fornetto Razzo bullet smoker.

The SmartFire connects to the Razzo using the mini cake tin adapter you get with the SmartFire, this is a simple install that The Flying Kiwi covers in the video above. Once turned on, you simply download the SmartFire App on your mobile, connect the SmartFire to your BlueTooth, and then to your Wifi and you are good to go.

All the guides you need can be found on the SmartFire website and their support is amazing, Mark & Monique are an amazing team and are very active on the SmartFire Users group on Facebook. The one outage I experienced was quickly resolved and Mark took us along the journey to get it resolved, you couldn’t ask for more!

“If I didn’t have the SmartFire, I would have given up Low and Slow Cooking a long time ago.” – Clint

What I have learned using the SmartFire on the Razzo?

  • The Razzo 22″ has quite a wide fuel basket, don’t go too light on the amount of fuel, the SmartFire does its best work when it has the fuel to burn, I learnt this the hard way in my first 2 cooks where I had to keep adding charcoal into the Razzo to keep the temp up, as soon as I just filled it up well, it just kept temps solid
  • The only thing I have to do occasionally now is push some charcoal into the hot spot, this is more to do with the size of the holes in the fuel basket and how spread out the fuel gets in there. Something I am working on a modification for, stay tuned.
  • One bottom vent open half way and the top vent open a quarter is all that is needed to keep the temps stable without the SmartFire having to work too hard. This will depend on your fuel, so don’t take this as gospel.
  • Let the SmartFire do its job, it is tempting to keep adjusting vents but the more I left it alone, the better the SmartFire operated.
Fornetto-Razzo-SmartFire

The SmartFire is amazing and what I like about it the most is that it gives you the ability to learn how to work with different meats, something I have been fine-tuning with every cook, when the temp is controlled you are free to focus on the most important aspect of all cook ups, the meat and flavour.

If you have any questions or feedback on the SmartFire, drop in a comment below or hit me up on Facebook or Insta, I will continue to add to this post after a few more cook-ups, I have a dozen under my belt and couldn’t be happier with the SmartFire.

Cheers Reyan

Reyan
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