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Topic: Barbecues & Grills



Date Posted: Monday, June 22, 2015
Posted by: Tanya Zanfa (Master Admin)
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2015/06/15/10-great-gril...


10 Great Grills and Smokers for Backyard Cooking Season


10 Great Grills and Smokers for Backyard Cooking Season

Americans love cooking outside, and in less than one week it will officially be summer, prime grilling and smoking season in most parts of the country. If you are lucky enough to live where the weather is conducive to outdoor cooking year round, that’s even better. But in any case, whether you have an urban balcony or vast acreage, there are some great outdoor cooking devices for you.

Weber Smoky Mountain Water Smoker: This is the navy blue blazer of outdoor cooking, a classic that never goes out of style and always works in a pinch. It’s an excellent traditional smoker for burning hardwood charcoal, capable enough to win major BBQ competitions, yet easy enough to use that anyone can do it. The design is time proven, it’s easy to regulate and maintain temperature (the trickiest part of live fire smoking), and there are limitless recipes specifically perfected for this model. It’s been around so long there are also lots of great accessories, and it does double duty as a regular backyard kettle grill for cooking burgers or steaks. The upright style uses a water tray instead of a more typical offset design to keep the food cooking low and slow, resulting in a much smaller porch footprint for a smoker big enough to cook a couple of full rib racks and a whole brisket at the same time. Finally, it’s reasonably priced, very well made, and has been for a long time. You can’t go wrong, and it comes in three sizes ($200-$400).

Weber Smoky Mountain Grill

A true classic, the Weber Smoky Mountain is a top quality smoker that can produce perfect slow smoked ribs, but also does double duty as a traditional kettle grill for cooking steaks or burgers.

Fast Eddy by Cookshack PG500: There is a good reason pellet grills are the fastest growing category of outdoor cookery: I can’t say enough about the advantages, as they do everything from pro level competition BBQ smoking to seared steak grilling and do it more easily than any other type of device. Pellet grills burn small hardwood pellets about the size of a pencil eraser, which you buy in bags of all different types of woods. Better grills have a storage hopper and electronic auger that feeds pellets them into a firebox. With an electronic igniter and digital thermostat, like an oven, there is no chimney starter or newspaper, no charcoal to light – you just push a button. They are easier to clean up than other types of smokers, and do a great job, whether you are slow smoking at 215° for 12 hours or searing steaks at 500° for two minutes. The only knock on pellet grills is that they are so easy and so consistent they take the “challenge” out of outdoor cooking. This is my personal go-to model among the six grills and smokers at my house, made of heavy duty stainless steel. Cookshack is a family owned company that has been manufacturing commercial and restaurant smokers and grills in Ponca City, Oklahoma for half a century. Cookshack partnered with “Fast Eddy” Maurin, a Kansas City barbecue cook who has won many prestigious titles, to design this line for home and competition use. The PG500 was introduced four years ago and runs about $1,600.

FastEddy smoker

The FastEddy lineup of pellet grills from Cookshack are made-in-America workhorses that can smoke and grill at the highest level.

Backyard Riodizio: Have you ever been to one of those all-you-can-eat Brazilian style riodizo restaurants like Fogo de Chao or Texas de Brazil? In Brazil, a wide variety of meats (and other items) are cooked on rotating skewers and served from them tableside, a style of cooking known as churrascaria. A few years back I wrote about my awesome Carson Rotisserie Grill here in detail, but since then the passionate founder, Blake Carson, sold the company, which seems to have vanished. Now he is back with an all-new and even better style of the same concept (read the original piece to see why this is so cool). Whereas the old version was a stand-alone system, the newest Carson Riodizo kit sits atop any larger grill of any style and converts it into a home riodizio. A motorized back plate stands vertically and has revolving sockets for six skewers. You can load these up in advance and then when you are ready to cook, just light the grill, stick the skewers in and let them turn. The cooking is self-basting and you can vary heat like the old model by raising and lowering skewers, but now there is a second option, adjusting the heat of the grill itself. Another improvement is that on most gas grills you still have leftover grate space on which you can keep the skewers warm after removing them. This thing looks cool, will blow away your guests with an incredible visual and flavor display, and quite simply is unlike anything else on the market. It works on most good sized gas grills, on komodo grills like the Big Green Egg, on kettle charcoal grills, can insert into the side of the classic Weber Smoky Mountain described above, and even cooks over a homemade primitive wood fire. Carson will begin shipping the new models in August ($498) with a hundred dollar discount for pre-orders. TV host and award-winning grilling author Steven Raichlen runs the annual BBQ University grill-fest at the Broadmoor resort in Colorado (which I have written about in detail here) and used an advance demo of the new Carson rotisserie at this year’s event. “It was fantastic – people just stared at it slack jawed,” he reported.

Carson Riodizio kit

The brand new Carson Riodizio kit turns any larger grill into a Brazilian eatery. The kit is shown here on a Weber Genesis gas grill but also works on all sorts of gas and coal cookers.

Grillworks: Bring a taste of Buenos Aires home with one of these beautiful, ultra-heavy duty, Argentinean inspired, made-in-the-USA grills. Argentina is the most barbecue crazed country on earth and consumes more than twice as much beef per capita as we do. They cook almost of all of it on parilla grills over open wood fire. This is the kind of grill you will find in high-end Buenos Aires steakhouses, with very sturdy steel construction and the heat controlled by raising and lowering grates with wheels and chains. For 30 years Grillworks has been making beautiful versions that will last a lifetime and are the choice of many top professional chefs – for their own homes. They are pricey and the company does a lot of custom restaurant, kitchen and outdoor installations of all types and sizes, plus a lineup of “off the rack grills.” All have one or more oversized crank wheels, are completely made of heavy gauge stainless steel, and feature V-shaped grate bars for easy cleanup. The “entry level” residential Griller model starts north of three grand, but your neighbors will be more impressed than if you bought a new Porsche.

Grillworks

Grillworks makes elaborate custom wood burning Argentinean grills for restaurants and commercial applications like this, but also offers a lineup of beautiful steel residential models for backyard use.

RecTec Mini Portable Pellet Grill: If you don’t want to lay out the thousand plus dollars that most high quality pellet grills cost, consider this smaller but excellent workhorse. It’s the size of a standard two burner gas grill and the legs fold up, so one person can move it. Its 341 square inch grill can still do a whole brisket, a couple of chickens or a few racks of ribs, with top quality steel construction at just $499. A temperature range from 180°-550° means it works great as a smoker or grill, and its larger version was awarded the Gold Medal for Best Value by comprehensive grill and smoker testing site AmazingRibs.com. The detailed review noted that the company features the same very high quality touchpad controller used in some of the best and priciest pro smokers, and the RecTec consistently held perfect temperature across its entire cooking surface. You would be hard pressed to get this much grill for the money anywhere else, and you can take it on the road.

 

Pellet smoker grill

The RecTec Mini is a fully featured, high-quality pellet grill and smoker that can serve as a primary backyard cooking device but is also portable.

 

Kalamazoo Outdoor Gourmet Grills: If there is a Rolls Royce of grills, it is this lineup painstakingly handcrafted in Kalamazoo, MI by craftsmen so proud they sign every grill personally. In backyards across America a debate rages between the taste of wood or charcoal and the convenience and consistency of gas. If you are lucky – and wealthy – enough to have a Kalamazoo Grill, you never have to choose, thanks to the company’s unique Hybrid Fire Grilling System, which can burn propane or natural gas one moment, then coal or wood the next. They actually have three heat choices, with dual infrared burners for the heavy duty motorized rotisserie. Everything about these grills is ultra-heavy duty: two fairly strong adults could not budge the model I tested, the KT750HS. The middle of three sizes in the series has three super-high output burners, double side burners, the rotisserie – and a price tag north of seventeen thousand dollars. What you get for this is incredible durability, incredible craftsmanship, and unrivalled raw cooking power: the burners produce a staggering 75,000 BTUs, twice as much as most high-quality three burner grills, reaching1000°. That’s the kind of temperature the highest end steakhouses buy special broilers to sear at, considerably higher than even commercial ranges can reach in the kitchen. Then there is the duel fuel option – which lights logs or charcoal at the push of a button – and the incredible chain-driven rotisserie, which can do four whole chickens or a leg of lamb and cook it perfectly with the infrared. The company also makes equally over-the-top backyard pizzerias and gaucho grills, all of heavy steel.

Kalamazoo gas grill

The ultra-heavy duty Kalamazoo grills burn gas or wood, put out more BTUs than other grills, and feature chain-driven rotisseries with infrared burners.

 

Brick Oven Pizzeria: Invented in Naples and quickly taking over the world, the success of brick oven pizza is simple – it tastes great. Many residential backyard brick ovens or brick pizza ovens are custom made, but a notable exception is Forno Bravo, which does restaurant installations, custom designs, and offers four lines of full home ovens designed for modular construction and delivered to you, with kits starting under two thousand. But most of us don’t want to spend that much or lose all the space a pizza oven requires, so I personally have found another excellent solution: the BakerStone Pizza Oven Box. An instant brick oven pizzeria, it simply sits on your gas grill. The device essentially turns any larger gas grill into a brick oven pizzeria and it works great, reaching up to 800° and cooking a pizza in three minutes – for around $130. I wrote at length about my pizza making trials with this device here at Forbes.com and it can also cook meats, vegetables and other wood oven roasted high-temp dishes.

BakerStone pizza box

The simple and inexpensive BakerStone pizza box works great and turns any larger gas grill into a brick oven pizzeria reaching 800 degrees.

Memphis Wood Fire Grill: This high-end line of pellet smoker/grill combos takes backyard cooking up a notch and may be as close as you can get to a true all in one gourmet solution. It offers three distinct ways to cook everything from championship-style slow smoked brisket to flash seared steaks to baked pies. The same pellet fed firebox that uses a digital controller to hold a precise “low and slow” smoking temp of 180°-275° can grill and sear at more than 700°. But it is the addition of a dual fan convection cooking system that sets this unit apart and lets you roast chicken like on a rotisserie without the moving parts, bake pies, and do all the cool things you can do with a convection oven in the kitchen, cooking faster and more evenly without drying food out or even flipping it. It also has a unique dual hopper, dual auger system found on very few pellet grills that lets you use two different types of wood pellets (oak, hickory, pecan, mesquite, etc.) simultaneously, creating custom smoke blends. It’s built in the USA out of very heavy duty 430 stainless steel and designed like traditional commercial-style appliances, with the same kind of double wall, sealed air gap construction used in home ovens for better heat retention, rare in grills. These are quality units through and through, and even grilling expert and award-winning cookbook author and TV host Steven Raichlen agrees. Raichlen does not generally favor pellet grills because they make cooking “too easy” and take the “challenge” out of it, but he told me he was very impressed with the Memphis models and added “many cheaper pellet grills don’t generate much smoke, but this one does and it is one of the few that lets you remove the top of the chamber and grill over an open fire.” Memphis makes four models, all available as stand-alone cart grills or built-in units for outdoor kitchen installations. All have the signature convection feature, and range from the $1,500 Select to the $4,600 Elite shown and described above.

Memphis pellet grill

The Memphis Grill lineup feature high-end, heavy duty pellet grills that include convection fans for even, faster cooking and baking, and many models have dual hoppers to create custom wood smoke blends.

 

FireGrill: For those seeking a simpler, old fashioned, cowboy approach to backyard cooking – over an open fire – there is the FireGrill. It may be simple but it is also functional and beautiful, the creation of Swiss engineer and restaurateur Charly Kocher. Inspired by the romantic warmth and charm of a fireplace, this is a modular grilling system that can cook over coal or wood, inside or out, in the fireplace or the backyard. The heart of the system is a heavy duty stand to which various components can be mounted. The most typical configuration is a large rectangular grill grate that can easily be raised and lowered over the fire, but there are also options like a pot hanger for a cowboy-style Dutch oven, a 6-skewer shish-kabob rack, ring for a wok, a motorized rotisserie, and even a stone lined, domed convection pizza oven. If you don’t have a perfect spot for your live fire, there is also a large dish-shaped fire pit base for holding burning coal or wood. The starter stand and grill run around $330. This is a basic but highly functional setup, bulletproof, romantic and extremely portable, with all components Swiss-engineered and made in the USA of cast iron or carbon steel with high-heat resistant coating.

La Caja China: Some cookers are extremely flexible in their use, others, like pizza ovens, are narrower. But it doesn’t get too much more specific than La Caja China, a “pig box,” whose main purpose in life is to roast whole pigs, though you can put anything big, from several turkeys to large pork shoulders in with good results. The device is an ingenious way to recreate the traditional long, slow luau style pig roast except faster and without digging any holes, heating rocks or burying the pig. The original model is a coffin-like wood box on wheels that is lined with aluminum and topped with an aluminum cover. The pig goes in, the cover goes on, and you pile burning charcoal on top of the lid. The metal conducts the heat all the way around the pig, while cooking it more intensely from above, like a broiler, to crisp the skin (you flip the pig halfway through). I was an early adopter and bought the original model about15 years ago, and the results have been consistently spectacular. The simple but efficient design does several things right: it locks in all the moisture to keep the pig juicy and succulent while creating shattering crispy and delicious skin that guests can’t stop eating. It greatly reduces the time needed to roast a whole pig (my model holds up to a hundred and ten pounder) from a full day to less than 5 hours. Because this is not smoking, but roasting, the top burning design keeps all contact with smoke and thus smoky flavor away from the pig. For this reason you can season as you see fit, perfect for Caribbean and Asian-style preparations, and use cheap charcoal briquettes since you need to generate only heat, not flavor. Since I bought my basic La Caja China #2 roaster ($370) the lineup has greatly expanded. There is now a larger wooden #4 model for up to a 200 pound pig, as well as a heavier duty, more commercial version of the #2 made of powder coated diamond plated steel ($900).

Happy cooking!



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