Product Review: Hark Electric Digital Smoker
We’ve found the Hark Digital Electric smoker to be a great smoker for the beginner and regularly use one ourselves to smoke fish, chicken, pork and beef.
Every smoke we’ve done has greatly added that awesome flavour one hopes to achieve when smoking. Our favourite is to smoke a cheap piece of beef and turn it into Jerky!
Now let’s tell you about some of the features.
Being a digital electric smoker, you can accurately set the temperature and the time you want to smoke. It has an on/off switch, time setting button and temperature controller. To set the temperature, press the temp button, use the up and down arrow and then lock it in by pressing the temp button again. Complete the same procedure to set the time if desired. We prefer to use a digital thermometer with a meat probe and rely on the internal temperature of the meat. The display shows the current temperature and the time. There is a light indicator showing if the power is on and if the element is in use.
The Hark Digital Electric Smoker has two easily adjustable door locks to assist the door seals to keep the smoke in. Due to the nature of smoking, you will always get leakage of smoke. To adjust the locks to the right position wind them in and out. These should be adjusted so that when closed they have a solid feel to the action.
On the right side of the unit it has a pellet/wood chip shoot to easily add more fuel for smoking. To use it, place your chips/pellets into the shoot and let it go so that they are 'flicked' in. Repeat until all chips/pellets have gone. Be sure to read the directions on how much to use, as over filling can lead to flare ups (in any smoker). The great part about the shoot is that you can easily add more pellets/chips at any time without opening the door and loosing heat/smoker.
Internally this smoker has 4 large shelves, 1 small shelf a water tray and a sausage rack that can be used to anything from salami, sausages or even fish. In this video we are hanging a Rainbow Trout from the hanging rack, and smoking some pork belly and chicken that we later cooked on a spit rotisserie.
The Hark Digital Electric Smoker generally retails for around $500 at time of recording in Australia, and is a great smoking appliance.
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