If you were to rate all of the cool options for smoking food, propane smokers would be near the bottom. There are so many flashier alternatives to cook and infuse smoky flavor like a Big Green Egg, a Weber Summit or modified Weber kettle grill, an ace in the hole like the PK 360 Grill & Smoker, a barrel-shaped offset smoker, or even a backyard smokehouse. Hell, my buddy Tony once catered an event with a giant trailer-mounted rig that spat flames and fed dozens. Using a propane tank seems so effete in comparison. You don't use gas to fuel your smoker, goes the thinking, you use wood.
And yet! I'd heard good early reports about the Masterbuilt MPS 330G, a tall and boxy unit known as a cabinet smoker that offered a degree of control and an ease that makes most other methods look baroque.
How's that? Smoking food tends to require hands-on attention. (From here on out, I'll be talking about "hot smoking" where you both cook the food and smoke it, as opposed to "cold smoking" which applies smoke without heat.) Wood and charcoal fires need tending. The temperature in your smoker needs monitoring. You might need an independent thermometer to make sure it's cooking at the temperature you want. It can take hours. By nature, it is fussy and you need to be nearby in case things go sideways. It can be a great way to spend an afternoon sipping beers with your pals, but it is a commitment, and on the wrong day it can feel like a chore.
I loved the Masterbuilt because it's none of that. Instead, it embraces an idea that's deceptively simple and years old and something that much of the industry eschews: an effective thermostat to lock in the cooking temperature. Just set the big, plasticky dial at the Masterbuilt's base to the exact temperature you want to cook at.
The 330G is pretty simple: four racks are stacked in a cooking chamber that looks like a filing cabinet. Below them sits a combo drip and water pan which, among other things, keeps things moist, not too hot, and helps the smoke stick to your ribs. Further down is the tray where you put your wood chips or chunks, and below that is a heat diffuser and a gas burner. In this setup, you can think of it like this: the gas provides the heat to cook the food and the wood chips or chunks provide the smoky flavor.
There are a fair number of pellet smokers with thermostats and temperature control on the market, and while some of those work, some don't, and most are very expensive. You can also get accessory thermostat controllers for all kinds of wood- and charcoal-burning grills and smokers, but that's kind of missing the point. At $250, the Masterbuilt is, comparatively, dirt-cheap. You fire it up, you set the temperature, you put the food in, then you go about your life while it cooks.
Before I cooked a thing, I used the push-button igniter to start the burner, set the temperature and put a probe from my trusty ThermoWorks Smoke thermometer in there, first on the rack just above the Masterbuilt's temperature sensor, then on each of the three other shelves. Each one was only a few degrees from the temperature I'd set it to. Plus, I let it sit on each rack for a while to watch for temperature fluctuations that can appear like mood swings in other smokers, but in the 330G, there were none.
As rudimentary as this seems—after all, we've been setting the temperature in our home gas ovens for decades—this is like a superpower. The food you're both cooking and smoking in there turns out how you want it, when you want it, making cooking much more predictable. Why this isn't the standard for regular-old gas grills is beyond me. Hey Weber! Hey Char-Broil! Hey every other gas grill manufacturer out there! Why isn't this the norm?
The 330G allows you to follow a recipe and make plans. In my case, it freed me up to go for a swim.