Always preferred charcoal to gas but this grill makes lighting charcoal a breeze. Propane ignition lights charcoal in minutes, I have not had to use a chimney nor lighter fluid once. They utilize charcoal briquettes to fuel the cooking and add flavor to your meats, vegetables, and other foods. While using a charcoal grill tends to take longer, many traditionalists feel that the taste is so superior to other grill options that it’s worth the extra effort.
They’re versatile too since they can use either traditional charcoal briquettes or lump charcoal as fuel. Our last test is grilling barbecued ribs, specifically baby back pork ribs. This style of cooking requires strict temperature control over a period of multiple hours. Ideally, a quality charcoal grill (or any smoker) will keep its fire humming along close to 225 degrees F for as long as possible. Lidless charcoal grills may be good for simple grilling, like cooking burgers and shrimp over direct heat, but you need a lid to successfully roast turkeys and smoke ribs. The average full-size grill is around 400 to 500 square inches—plenty of room to make enough food for a backyard gathering.
Grill grates are typically made with stainless steel, cast iron, and enamel, each with their pros and cons. A. Because it offers the easiest operation, a Weber gas grill is usually the best option for beginners. To start the grill, you only have to turn a few dials and press the ignition button, weber gas grill and your grill is ready in minutes. Cleanup is also easy, so you might be inclined to grill more often than if you had a charcoal model. When you’re choosing among the different types of Weber grills, opting for gas, charcoal, or electric is really a matter of personal preference.
Although cooking on charcoal requires a little more skill and labor, you don’t need a PhD to start the fire. Yes, you do have to remove ash but, unlike with gas grills, most of the grease that drips off food will burn up on the weber charcoal grill hot coals, rather than collect at the bottom. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good gas grill—in fact, you can read about my favorite gas grills right here—but I’ll take cleaning a charcoal grill over a gasser any day of the week.
A portable grill offers the same benefits and limitations as full-size models. It’s easier to take on a road trip but less convenient to use for a large group. This unique grill offers the best of both worlds, allowing you to cook with either wood or charcoal. It has a considerable cooking surface, with an over-fire suspended tripod and barrel design that lets it grill, cook, smoke, and use over a fire pit. One of its best features is the height-adjustable charcoal tray, which has three fixed settings for different heat levels.
The 357 PRO wouldn’t be a Hasty-Bake without their classic adjustable-height charcoal tray that can be raised and lowered with a crank. The coals can move from 14.5 inches to 2.5 inches away from the cooking surface for serious direct infrared searing, a lot like a classic Santa Maria-style grill. Energy at the food level reduces rapidly as the coals move away, so this is a very effective temperature controller.
We recommend these products based on an intensive research process that’s designed to cut through the noise and find the top products in this space. Guided by experts, we spend hours looking into the factors that matter, to bring you these selections. If you want a Weber for tailgating, camping, etc., this is one of the best portable grills out there. We noted similar temperature performance from the Nexgrill, along with similar rib results.
This gives smoke plenty of time to leisurely caress foods and impart that magic, smoky goodness. For a long while, charcoal grills were the primary tool of backyard grillers. Hasty-Bake introduced its wonderful cooker with a crank that raises and lowers the charcoal rack in 1948, and it remains one of our favorite brands to this day. When Weber-Stephen rolled out its now iconic charcoal kettles in 1952, they lit a fire in backyards coast to coast and barbecue grew into a national pastime.
So far I’ve grilled salmon, chicken breast, burgers and hot dogs on it and they’ve all cooked evenly and browned very well. Because of its smaller size, charcoal usage is reduced but it still gets plenty hot enough to do an effective job,” noted one buyer. With 360 square inches of primary cooking surface, the grill box is larger than the 300 square-inch Classic model, but retains PK’s characteristic flat bottom and rectangular shape. There’s also a unique configuration of bottom left and right adjustable air intake dampers and corresponding top left and right exhaust dampers. The wide flat bottom makes it easy to push charcoal to one side and create two very distinct direct and indirect zones.
If you’re cooking for one or two people, you can afford to lose some cooking space, but for events and dinner parties, you should skew larger. The larger the surface size, the more vegetables and meats you can cook at one time. No other grill in this group could match the rock-solid temperature control of this iconic cooker. Readings from our own thermocouples, plus a digital pit thermometer, confirmed this. Throughout the Weber’s 6-hour, 32-minute cook time, the grill’s internal heat levels never strayed beyond 25 degrees of our target, 225 degrees F.