Kettle Charcoal Grills

How much coal would I need for a BBQ party of 100 people, cooked over 5 hours. Have 80 lbs of chicken, 120 burgers and 40 lbs of beef to cook. The charcoal is going to burn hot for longer than weber charcoal grill you really need but will be hot enough in the time you use it for some serious searing action. When cleaning rust off of a BBQ grill, use soap, warm water, and detergent to scrub the grill.

Two adjustable charcoal trays allow the temperature of the high gloss, porcelain enameled cast iron grates to be controlled separately. The trays can each be accessed through the two front doors so you can add more coals as needed or move them around during cooking. Its ash tray is located beneath the charcoal trays in a drawer that can be pulled out for cleaning.

Find charcoal barbecue grills that can handle everything from grilling to smoking your favorite foods online now. 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.

weber charcoal grill

After the grill has heated up for 10 minutes, the steaks are ready to hit the grill grate. In our medium, indirect-heat chicken tests, the Nexgrill delivered flavorful, juicy meat as a close second to the Weber. And this updated model, when we used the charcoal snake method, demonstrated temperature control almost as good as the Weber.

That said, if you forget to turn off a gas grill, it can eventually cause the tank valve to go into a bypass state, a safety feature that reduces the flow of gas. Once in bypass state, a grill won’t heat greater than 300 degrees. If that happens, you’ll need to go through a process to reset the valve.

The Hovergrill adds an additional 247 square inches of cooking with a solid stainless steel grill rack. The 22-inch Napoleon Rodeo Charcoal Kettle Grill (model number NK22CK-L) is considered one of the better Weber clones available (the pros at AmazingRibs.com, among others, rate it highly). In our cooking tests it performed well, though not quite as well as the Weber. In particular, we didn’t find its unique heat-diffusing portable bbq plate—a shallow metal dome that sits in the middle of the coal bed—to be as effective as we would have liked. We loved its height; however, at 34 inches at the grates, it’s nearly counter height, and a full 7 inches taller than the Weber, so it was less tiring to work on. The Napoleon’s four legs, versus the Weber’s three, make this grill more stiff and stable, and allow for a nice big shelf underneath.

The Cuisinart was also the only grill with which we experienced grease flare-ups when cooking. Though you only have to endure setup one time, build time is definitely relevant if you’re picking up a charcoal grill for a last-minute barbecue. The Weber Original Premium Grill took 15 minutes to assemble, while the Weber Original Grill took only 10 minutes.

However, we found that the Go-Anywhere grill consistently stacked up against the gas-guzzling competition in terms of output power and cook times. I don’t know what type of cooker you’re using, what temp you’re cooking at over those 5 hours…but I would guess you’ll need a full bag of charcoal at your disposal to be safe. In these cases I like to use around 30 briquettes, about 1.5 pounds worth, and bank them on the left side of the grill. I like to light one side of the charcoal bed with either a paraffin wax cube or even a propane torch. Let the fire slowly burn across the charcoal bed while your meat cooks on the opposite side of the grill. The temperature of your grill will be determined by how much charcoal you use and how much air is available to the charcoal.

Some of the ash will fall through to the ash catcher a few inches below the bowl. For the rest, Weber has equipped the Original Kettle with its “One-touch” ash removal system. It’s a rotating group of three blades you turn with a handle projecting from near the bottom of the bowl.