Three machines, three different ideas of what "easy" means Kamado, gravity-fed charcoal and electric bisquette smoking all produce genuinely good barbecue. They disagree on what you should be doing with your hands while it cooks. A kamado hands you a vent and asks you to manage the fire. A gravity-fed grill hands you a dial and manages the fire itself, as long as the power stays on. A Bradley smoker removes fire management from the equation entirely, at the cost of the highest heat you can reach. If you want the broader rundown that also covers pizza ovens, portable BBQs and gas — we've written that one already. This is the narrower question underneath it: if smoking specifically is what...

A wood puck, on a heated plate, for exactly twenty minutes Every Bradley Smoker is built around one part most other smokers don't have: an automatic feeder that pushes a fresh compressed-wood bisquette onto a heating plate every twenty minutes, then shoves the spent one off into a water bowl below. Load enough bisquettes for the length of your cook, set the temperature, and the smoker manages the smoke generator entirely on its own for hours at a time. It's a genuinely unusual piece of engineering — and it's also the reason Bradley smokers will only run on Bradley bisquettes. Loose wood chips or pellets jam the feeder mechanism outright. Why there's a water bowl involved at all The water...