The Gonzo Grill, contained by its included nylon bag, requires two hands to carry but is a little less fiddly otherwise. Models like this are easy to carry into the park to find your ideal picnic spot. With any grill, cleaning them before transporting them will lead to less mess. Things worth considering when it comes to size are where you’re going to use the grill, how many people you’re cooking for, and how you’ll get it there.
Be the envy of your next pregame party with these CNET-tested small and portable grills. For the charcoal options, I also smoked ribs, pork, and brisket, If you’re planning to smoke, I highly recommend investing in some kind of thermometer system. It has adapters based on your grill and offers one temp probe and three food probes. There’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support, so you can keep tabs on your cook from anywhere. If flavor is your only criterion, I would argue that charcoal is superior to propane gas. Often, we grill after hours on a Friday while we’re also trying to set up a tent, inflate a mattress, and wrangle hungry children.
Porcelain-coated cast-iron cooking grates are best at searing foods. Though cast iron adds an extra 5 to 10 pounds to the total weight of a grill, we think the flavorful dark weber q crust on burgers and steaks makes it worthwhile. We also prefer an open grate design that allows ambient heat from the firebox to brown the areas in between the grill marks.
Like the Traveler, the Weber Q2200 can also accommodate a full-size propane cylinder with an adapter. The push-button ignition is battery powered, which I actually found slightly easier to use. The Q1200 arrives mostly assembled—we were able to get it ready for testing in less than 10 minutes. Lighting it was easy thanks to its battery-powered electric ignition that’s a welcome upgrade over the less reliable piezo ignitions found on many portable gas grills. Smaller grills can manage with 8,000 BTUs , while larger models might need 20,000 BTUs per burner. As a guideline, consider that heat output should be between 80 and 100 BTUs per square inch of cooking surface.
Her expertise builds on a lifelong career in the culinary world—from a restaurant cook and caterer to a food editor at Martha Stewart. She is perfectly happy weber charcoal grill to leave all that behind to be a full-time kitchen-gear nerd. Keeping coals lit in the Weber Smokey Joe Charcoal Grill 14″ was a challenge for us.
The large surface of the Cuisinart All Foods Roll-Away gives the cook multiple heat zones to work with while grilling. The infrared burner of the Solaire Everywhere heats the entire grill surface to about the same temperature. This is good for cooking lots of one type of food, but not so good if you’re hoping to cook different foods at different rates. Even though the Jumbo Joe isn’t the smallest or most compact charcoal grill we tested, it is lightweight and easy to carry. The lid-locking metal handle tightly holds the grill together for transport and pulls double duty as a convenient lid holder. And since the spacious firebox fits a full chimney starter’s worth of coals, you can get two or three rounds of grilling per load.
The Weber Smokey Joe 14-inch is a kettle design that features most of the features found in Weber’s larger kettle models. The dual damper system provides the ability to easily control the heat inside the grill for slow cooking or high-heat searing, and the porcelain enamel finish provides excellent heat retention. Wirecutter’s Michael J Kennelly used the Weber Q 1200 we tested to grill on his roof in Brooklyn from 2019 to 2020. They said the two-part grate was a little more annoying to deal with than the one-part grate on older Weber Q models, but it made up for it in ease of cleaning.
Running out of gas without a refill can bring your cookout to a halt, while foraging for firewood may prove possible when the charcoal burns out too soon. There’s no correct answer; it depends on your preference for space and ease of use. The GoBQ also performed well, cultivating a steady and hot fire, and has a robust 185 square inches of grilling space. It’s a little more expensive than some on the market, but it’s built to last. If you want portable charcoal grilling in a truly portable package, this is the best small grill to buy.
Portable natural gas grills can’t provide the flavor of charcoal grills, are not as common as other types of portable grills, and tend to cost more than propane models. For smoking and other forms of low and slow barbecue, portable wood pellet grills give you more cooking surface area than portable gas or charcoal grills do. On a gas or charcoal grill, you’d need to weber q set up a 2-zone cooking system with the heat on one side, and the food on the other. On a Traeger, you can use the entire cooking surface to barbecue. The grill functions like a smaller version of a full-size gas grill. We loved that we could light it by simply turning each burner’s knob to the ignition setting—there was no need to fiddle with an ignition button.
While the Weber Original Kettle may have taken the top spot in CNET’s list ofbest charcoal grills, this newcomer is my pick for the best portable charcoal grill. A smart and solid build allows you to take this small grill anywhere, including on a long hike. Soaring in popularity, they come in a vast assortment of fuel types such as gas, pellet, electric, or charcoal.