We tried this grill out along with the brand’s grilling kit (available for purchase separately), and found the accessories to be good quality and useful. We sent various portable gas grills to the homes of our expert reviewers in addition to testing in our Lab. Our Lab testers grilled and seared steak, salmon, weber charcoal grill onions, hamburgers, and hamburger buns on each model to thoroughly analyze the features and performance. Additionally, the grills were carried around our Birmingham, Alabama, campus to test portability. Our home reviewers spent weeks assessing how these grills stood up to everyday cooking and cleaning.
For more details on how we tested and what we looked for, scroll down to the bottom. The collapsible Weber Traveler is basically a full-size propane grill on wheels, making it a perfect choice for small patios and times when you need to bring a grill to a cookout or a party. It’s easy to set up – it pops up and collapses on hydraulics with the flip of a lever. Once erected, you have a large cooking space–320 square inches–and a prep table. It also features some nice bells and whistles, including a removable grease tray, built-in thermometer, and removable cooking grates, which were easy to clean between uses.
That said, the Camp Chef Portable Pellet’s price is fairly reasonable considering its top-notch performance. 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 set up a 2-zone cooking system with the heat on one side, and the food on the other. Preventing grease and fire contact is especially important since the cooking grates on portable gas grills sit very close to the heating element (usually a 1- to 1½-inch clearance). Steel inserts that sit over the flame ports can help, as can a cleverly designed grilling grate that channels grease away from the fire.
This model is really heavy compared to the others, and it has a short handle. You also have to lay it on its back to convert it from travel to cooking mode, which is not ideal. But if you want a pellet grill for tailgating or base camping, this is still your best option. Once the grill is going, the Camp Chef Portable Pellet’s internal thermometer and the computer then take over to regulate the flow of pellets into the burner.
Warm weather is still a ways off for many of us, but this is time of year when, like a groundhog, the grill starts to poke out of the snow and show its rusty, neglected self. If you’re in need of a new grill this year, here’s our guide to the very best portable grills. We’ve researched and tested dozens of portable grills to see which can brat the best.
The Coleman Roadtrip 285 offers the cooking performance of your typical backyard grill in a portable package. There are three individual burners – a main burner that reaches across the entire grill from side to side, and two additional burners on each side. This configuration is weber genesis 2 specifically designed so that the heat zones overlap. The result is top-notch control coupled with incredibly even heat distribution. The Roadtrip 285’s instructions are clearly written and all tools required for assembly are included, making this model a breeze to put together.