The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is one of the biggest international trade shows in the world. Each year companies of all shapes and sizes — from startups to huge multinational conglomerates — flock to the Desert Oasis to exhibit their home entertainment products, computers, cars, and a mind-boggling assortment of all things electronic.

Technology has changed every activity in our lives, from work to leisure and from cleaning to cooking. In 2022, The Consumer Electronics Show introduced Food Tech as a new exhibitor category, and by 2024 we were on our way to Vegas to scope out the latest, greatest innovations from both familiar and fresh faces.

Perhaps no Food Tech product created more buzz at CES than GE Profile’s Smart Indoor Smoker. We’ve seen small, ineffective indoor smoker setups before that burn a handful of wood chips in a pot or pan under a kitchen range hood to give a whiff of smoke to small items like fish fillets. But GE Profile presented theirs as a full-blown indoor smoker that produces all the popular smoked delicacies like ribs and brisket, inside your home, while keeping the smoke in the appliance, not in the kitchen.

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In a nutshell, GE Profile’s Smart Indoor Smoker is a sealed oven with a 1,550-watt electric element at the bottom for cooking heat. The element sits under a protective cover as shown in this photo.

Wood pellets are burned inside the chamber to generate smoke. Here is a photo of the pellet hopper door on top where wood pellets are added.

A drip pan slides in at the bottom above the electric element.

A Waste Bin filled with water collects and extinguishes used pellets and ash.

Smoke exhaust is eliminated by a catalytic system located in the back before being blown out from the front bottom into your home. A counter guard slips under the oven front to protect your counter from the hot exhaust.

That smokeless exhaust is a pretty cool, thought-provoking feature. It’s kind of a magic trick.

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The mother of all indoor tabletop ovens

Well, at least in size. At 20.5″D x 16.5″W x 16.25″H and weighing 45 pounds, if it were much bigger one would have to consider it freestanding. GE Profile recommends that “the smoker should be positioned such that it has 4 inches of clearance to all sides of the appliance.” Our home has cabinets above all our countertops. The space between our counters and cabinet bottoms is 17.5 inches. The GE Profile smoker is 16.25 inches high leaving only 1.25 inches clearance. That was a little too close for comfort plus the footprint takes up a lot of countertop space. GE Profile encourages consumers to look at the measurements of the smoker and make sure that they have enough counter space and clearance.

We could have placed it on the kitchen range under our exhaust hood, then stored it away when not in use, but it was just a little too heavy and unwieldy for my poor old back and even though we have a fairly large house, our closets were already full of stuff and we couldn’t think of a good place to keep it.

So for our tests, the GE Profile Smoker took over our rarely used dining room, eliminating our kitchen range exhaust hood, but giving us space to operate without setting up and taking down for each use.

Multifunction indoor tabletop ovens

Multifunction tabletop ovens are wildly popular and available in a plethora of brands, models, and price ranges. Most can bake, toast, roast, griddle, and broil. Some air fry and/or make pizzas too. The Ninja Woodfire tabletop even has an outdoor smoking feature that uses an electric element for heat and burns wood pellets for smoke like GE. Click here to read our review of the Ninja Wooodfire. The GE Profile model we tested is designed specifically for smoking foods indoors. But that’s all it does. With a limited temperature range of 170°F to 300°F, it can’t even toast bread.

GE Profile responds,” You are correct that it was not designed to toast bread or even bake brownies for that matter. It’s a smoker and hopefully creates opportunity for new hobbyists to enter the category of smoking with less intimidation, indoor flexibility and digital monitoring to free up some time — allowing slow cooked meals during the week that used to be reserved for the weekend.”

GE Profile Smart Appliances

The GE Profile Smart Indoor Smoker is part of a suite of smart kitchen and home appliances, including large kitchen and laundry appliances, small appliances, filters, water heaters, and more. All of them have Wi-Fi and can be connected to GE’s SmartHQ App. 

The Indoor Smoker can be controlled from the app or the front panel.

One may choose several presets for Pork Ribs, Brisket, Wings, etcetera, that automatically set cooking temp and give progress notifications to the cook, then drop the temp to Keep Warm mode when done. Or select “Customize” to manually choose all settings. The Dial lights up with a ring that changes color to indicate statuses like Pre-heating, Smoking, or Keeping Warm.

Take note of the Clear Smoke/Resume Smoke Button under the Dial. To prevent smoke from escaping from the oven when you open the door to tend foods, select “Clear Smoke” to stop smoking and clear the chamber. The smoke-clearing process takes about 10 minutes. After that you can open the door, take care of business, close it, and resume smoking.

The Indoor Smoker accommodates one built-in Meat Probe (included). You can set the oven to cook by time or internal food temperature.

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Capacity

Three wire racks are included. The rack dimensions are 9″ x 11″, but the actual, usable cook surface is about 8″x 10″.

GE Profile’s capacity claims are questionable. They state the oven accommodates a 14-pound pork butt. We tried a 10-pound bone in butt and had to cut a couple of pounds off the sides to fit on one Wire Rack. A larger boneless butt could be cut in half and spread over two racks.

However, GE Profile warns the user to “avoid overloading the smoker chamber with food. Placing excessive amounts of food inside the smoker can interrupt airflow through the smoker chamber and hinder cooking performance.” To mitigate uneven heat and smoke circulation when the chamber is loaded, GE Profile recommends flipping and rotating foods periodically.

Here is our bone-in butt whittled down to around 8 pounds on the bottom rack.

Expecting GE Profile’s oven to be different from other smokers, we used their preset recipes and recipes from their included booklet instead of making our AmazingRibs.com recipes. Our pork ended up looking great with its deep mahogany bark, but there was little smoke aroma or flavor.

Coincidently, a grill designer friend, who is a great cook, was testing GE’s Smoker at the same time. He slightly disagreed, describing the smoke flavor as very mild, but “present.”

Back to capacity. GE Profile states this oven holds three racks of baby back ribs….really? Here’s one slab of ribs, cut up and spread out over two GE Profile Wire Racks.

What happened to not overloading the smoke chamber? You could cram two cut-up slabs over all three wire racks (we actually saw a company-sponsored video of three slabs that had been surgically cut to fit), but that’s got to be pushing the oven capacity even with frequent flipping and rotating. And what about clearing smoke before opening the door each time?

Results were the same as the pork butt. A dark brown finish with little smoke flavor. We can’t dismiss the visual appeal GE Profile’s smoker creates. To some extent we eat with our eyes, but boy we missed the smoky taste and smell. 

Note the uneven cooking. Though we dutifully flipped the ribs, we neglected to rotate and the bones on the right crumbled and fell off while the others were cooked properly. We were warned. Flip and rotate for best results.

Definitely use your included drip pan. Here’s what it collected after just one slab of ribs.

The Waste Bin can also fill up and needs to be cleaned after each use. A good amount of unburned pellets collected during long, low-and-slow cooks.

Water in the Waste Bin must be replenished before each smoke session. 

GE Profile’s smokeless magic trick

A few owners of GE Profile’s Indoor Smoker wrote negative online reviews complaining they experienced smoky exhaust that set off smoke alarms and irritated their eyes. However, like the vast majority of those who posted reviews, we saw smoke inside the oven, but none coming out. No screaming smoke alarms or runny eyes, just the smell of cooking, like on a Thanksgiving Day.

But wait a minute

Our last cooking test was Beef Ribeye Roast. By now we had determined we preferred recipes from GE’s recipe booklet over the presets. Although instead of their seasoning, we used our favorite, Meathead’s Amazing Smoked Red Meat Seasoning & Dry Brine. We trimmed our beauteous roast, rubbed it all over with a generous coat of Meathead’s Red Meat Seasoning, set the oven at 235°F, stuck the GE Profile Meat Probe into the meat, and popped open some vino to enjoy while tracking progress on the SmartHQ App. Following GE’s booklet, when the internal meat temp hit 120°F, we removed the roast from our dining room test area, brought it to the kitchen, and wrapped it in foil. We then returned to the dining room to preheat our oven to 500°F as directed. But wait a minute. Ohhhhhhh….that’s right. This oven only goes to 300°F.

Slack-jawed, we stared for a moment at the Control Panel. So we have to finish the roast in our kitchen oven? Despite the appealing dark finish, we were unimpressed by GE Profile’s smoke flavor and couldn’t help but think we should have just cooked the whole thing in our kitchen.

Packaging and assembly

The packaging was good and almost no assembly was required.

Conclusion

Who is the GE Profile Indoor Smoker made for? The obvious answer is someone who, for whatever reason, is unable to have an outdoor smoker. If one can’t have an outdoor smoker because they live in a condo or apartment, would their home likely be on the small side with limited space? If so, where will they put this big GE Profile? It could be placed on a kitchen island, but an apartment dweller likely wouldn’t have one. They could set it on their kitchen range, and then store it away when not in use. But that’s a pain and would they have a good place to store it anyway? That’s a lot of inconvenience for a tabletop oven that has a limited temperature range and can’t provide the versatility of today’s multi-function tabletop smart ovens that do everything but your taxes, usually cost way less, and fit easily on the counter in most kitchens.

Anyone who wants a smoker and has the option to smoke outdoors should choose that over this. What about the convenience and ease of use provided by GE’s SmartHQ App? These days plenty of affordable, Wi-Fi-enabled pellet smokers with apps are readily available. Even small models will have more capacity and often cost less than GE Profile’s $1,000 price tag. Pellet smokers are known to have mild smoke flavor, but we’ve tested an awful lot of them and all produced better smoke than this indoor model. For those who want stronger smoke, a growing number of thermostatically controlled, Wi-Fi enabled charcoal smokers are appearing in our brave new wireless world.

GE Profile contends, “We would disagree with your results here. We have heard from hundreds of consumers with a high level of satisfaction in the reviews about the smoke levels produced in this product. Several other media outlets have reviewed the Smoker with great accolades about the taste and performance.” Indeed, online reviews indicate many folks like their GE Profile Indoor Smokers. If that’s you, please let us know why by scrolling down and commenting in the section below. Is it simply the “gee whiz” factor associated with owning a rather unique smokeless indoor smoker? GE Profile’s Indoor Smoker performs its disappearing smoke trick well. But ultimately, we found it to be a one-trick pony that takes up a great deal of kitchen counter space. We give it our Bronze Medal.

Warranty

One-year limited warranty.

We thank GE Profile for providing an Indoor Smoker for our tests.