Oklahoma Joe's Laredo 1100 vs Weber Smokey Mountain 22

These two smokers are usually pitched as a philosophical argument — stick-burning purism against set-and-forget convenience — and the argument is normally settled with numbers neither manufacturer publishes.

So here is what they do publish, and what follows from it.

1,100 against 726, and why that comparison is misleading

Oklahoma Joe's lists 1,100 square inches of total cooking space for the Laredo 1100. Weber lists 726 square inches across two grates for the Smokey Mountain 22.

That reads as a rout. It is not, quite, because the two numbers are shaped differently.

Weber's 726 is two 22-inch circular grates stacked above each other. Divide it and each level is 363 square inches — which is exactly the grate area Weber publishes for the Original Kettle Premium 22, because it is the same 22-inch circle.

So the Smokey Mountain is, in cooking-surface terms, two kettle grates in a cylinder. That is a genuinely clever piece of engineering. It is not the same thing as one large surface.

The 22-inch problem

Stacking works for anything you can portion. It stops working the moment a single piece of food is longer than the grate.

A circle's longest straight line is its diameter. Weber publishes 22 inches, so nothing on either Smokey Mountain grate can lie flat in a line longer than 22 inches. That is geometry, not a performance claim, and it is the one hard constraint in this comparison.

The Laredo's 1,100 square inches sit in a barrel-style chamber with a dedicated offset firebox — one continuous surface, no tier to divide it. Oklahoma Joe's does not publish the chamber's length, so we cannot tell you how long a cut it takes. What we can say is that its capacity is not split in half by design.

If what you cook is ribs, chicken, pork butts, and anything else that portions, two 363-square-inch levels are 726 square inches of genuinely usable space. If what you cook is long, the shape of the number matters more than the number.

What neither company will tell you

Neither product page publishes a temperature range. Neither publishes a burn time, a refuelling interval, or a fuel consumption figure.

This is worth saying plainly because those are precisely the numbers this comparison usually turns on. Splits every forty-five minutes; eight hours unattended on one basket; holds 225°F without touching a vent. None of that comes from Oklahoma Joe's or from Weber. It comes from people's kitchens, and it varies with fuel, weather, and how open you run the dampers.

What the pages describe instead is hardware. The Laredo has a side air damper and an adjustable smokestack. The Smokey Mountain has a water pan and vents. Both are airflow controls; neither manufacturer promises what temperature they will produce.

The physics behind the water pan is real and is not a performance claim: water boils at 212°F and cannot go higher while it remains liquid, so a full pan puts a ceiling on how fast the air around it can climb. How steady that makes your particular cook is still not something Weber publishes.

How much each company tells you at all

This turned out to be the sharpest difference between them.

Weber tells you how much room to clear and what it will replace for ten years. Oklahoma Joe's product page tells you neither.

That is not evidence the Laredo is worse built. It is evidence you will be buying it with less information, and for a smoker that occupies a permanent spot in a yard, the missing dimensions are a practical problem rather than a philosophical one.

Which one to buy

Buy the Laredo 1100 if you want one continuous cooking surface and the offset firebox is the point rather than the price of entry. You are choosing more usable area in a single plane, and accepting a product page that will not tell you how big it is.

Buy the Smokey Mountain 22 if you would rather stack capacity into a 23-inch-wide footprint, and everything you cook fits inside a 22-inch circle. You also get published dimensions and a ten-year warranty on the parts that rust.

What should not decide it is a burn time or a holding temperature, because neither manufacturer publishes either.