On balance, gas is probably the better choice if you favor no-fuss cooking or grill often . If you’re an occasional griller or you enjoy getting hands-on with your cooking, charcoal is an economical choice that, with a bit of practice, produces superb results. Gertens has the largest selection of the most-popular Weber Grills available. From weber genesis 2 Weber to Napoleon, we’ve tested gas grills that cost less than $100 up to grills that cost more than a used car. Spider Grills Pella manages to make the charcoal-fueled Weber a wood-pellet grill in an elegant and easy way. It’s the most-automated path to low-heat smoking possible while remaining perfectly capable of high-heat grilling.
You can also use the grill to slow-roast whole chickens. The new grill design resolved all the pain points for consumers back in the 1950s, Kempster explains. The enclosed dome shape sealed in the smoky barbecue flavors and gave backyard chefs better heat control while cooking their meals. The lid also allowed backyard cooks to easily snuff out the coals when they were done cooking and prevented the barbecues from filling up with water.
While the burgers cooked we kept an eye out for undesirable flare-ups, which can char the meat and create acrid smoke, and examined the evenness of cooking on the different areas of the grates. After about 10 minutes of cooking , we compared how well each grill had seared the burgers, looking for any patties that were charred or unacceptably raw, and took a taste. This Weber’s plated steel cooking grate is hinged so that it’s easier to load charcoal, even while cooking, onto the heavy-gauge steel grate below. With this method, the coals take about 10 minutes to light and another 10 for the grill to get hot. Testing charcoal grills requires a lot of hands-on cooking, and your results will obviously vary based on your technique and ingredients, among other factors. Depending on the season and how your charcoal grill is set up, your experience cooking and grilling will likely be very different from ours.
With premium features, such as a hinged cooking grate for easily adding charcoal while grilling, and the One-Touch™ cleaning system with high-capacity ash catcher. At $319, the Napoleon portable charcoal grill is expensive. During our chicken cooking tests, however, this portable grill held its temperature better than any other charcoal grill we’ve tested.
The Heston Blumenthal Grill and Smoker leads in innovation and is a treat for the tech-savvy, according to Shoults. “The patent-pending ‘Fast Flame’ ignites with the touch of a button and the grill even connects to Bluetooth so that you can keep an weber q eye on your grilling at all times,” he said. With this type of grill, charcoal is poured into a vertical hopper. “As the fire burns, more charcoal is automatically fed — thanks to gravity — to the fire, resulting in long cook times,” he explained.
Both grills come from the Original Kettle series, which also offers an 18-inch option. Sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish one charcoal grill from the next, particularly when they come from the same brand. In this roundup, we’ll look at the Weber 22 vs 26 to determine what makes each one unique.