Storing Pellets Through a Humid New England Summer

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Hardwood pellets are compressed sawdust, dried to a low moisture content so they burn cleanly. When they soak up moisture from the air, they swell, crumble, and burn poorly.

On a Ninja Woodfire, that matters in a specific way. The oven heats with electricity — the pellets are only there for smoke. Damp pellets won’t stop your pizza from cooking, but they’ll smolder instead of burning cleanly, and you lose the wood-fired flavor you added them for. They can also leave dust and crumbs in the hopper.

Coastal New England summers are humid, so it’s worth a little attention.

Tells that pellets have gone soft

• The pellets crumble into sawdust when you pinch one.
• There’s more dust than pellets at the bottom of the bag or the hopper.
• The smoke looks gray and heavy instead of thin and pale, or it smells acrid.

If a bag has gotten away from you, don’t fight it. Pellet dust composts fine, and a fresh bag will smoke cleaner.

Simple ways to keep them dry

• Close the bag between cooks. An open bag sitting outside on a humid night is the fastest way to ruin pellets.
• Keep them off the ground. Pellets stored on a deck or a garage floor pick up moisture faster than pellets on a shelf.
• Avoid hot, damp spots. A sealed garage shelf beats a shed in August.
• Only load what you’ll use. The Ninja’s hopper takes about half a cup for roughly an hour of smoke. Leftover pellets sitting in the hopper for days are exposed to the weather.

Always use food-grade pellets made for grills and smokers. Heating pellets can contain binders that aren’t meant for food.

The three we rotate

We rotate three flavors: oak, maple, and a cherry blend. Oak is generally the most neutral, maple a little sweeter, and cherry a little fruitier. If you’re buying one bag, Ninja's All-Purpose Blend→ Amazon covers all three in one — cherry, maple, and oak. For more on which pellets are worth buying, see our Ninja Woodfire accessories guide.