But if you’re stuck with no way to cook over a flame, the Kenyon is well worth the money. Not everyone has a yard, and it’s increasingly common for apartments to ban open flame grills on balconies. It’s big enough for a family of four and strikes the best balance between ease of use and cooking performance. It has a thermometer and some side tables to hold your plates and tongs. It’s also a champ at keeping a constant, even heat in pretty much any weather conditions.
A top buy for alfresco table-top feasters, boaters and glampers. This is one of the most versatile charcoal-fired mini barbecues on the market and one of the most efficient. Invented in South Africa, the sturdy, kettle-style Cobb is a small, portable cylindrical unit that can grill, fry, bake and even roast a whole chicken, albeit a small one.
You’ll want to decide on a fuel type and think about where exactly you will be toting the grill before making your purchase. It weighs 22 pounds and has a handle with a bar that fits over the top to keep the kettle and lid together for easy carrying. I tossed mine in the back of the car for trips to the lake and the park and it never tipped over. The ash catcher at the bottom makes cleaning less of a hassle by allowing you to dump the excess without removing the grill grates. Although it does indeed produce very little smoke, if using indoors we would still recommend placing it on the cooker hob below the extractor fan for completely smoke-free grilling. For fire-prevention reasons, many campsites in Britain and France forbid the use of charcoal-based barbecues.
But it is expensive to run a website with more than 2,000 pages and we don’t have a big corporate partner to subsidize us. When the time came to clean up, we found the ashes were hard to remove from the GoBQ. There’s no ash basket, so you have to wait for the grill to cool down, remove the grill grate, and turn the whole grill over to remove any ashes. Solo Stove has been making fire pits for years, and they recently started selling cast-iron accessories to turn those fire pits into grills. If you’re not looking for a combo fire pit/grill, we recommend picking up the Solo Stove Grill Ultimate Bundle. The Traveler comes built into a rolling cart that stands at the perfect height for most grillers.
The KettlePizza add-on kit ($200) is fun, but way more expensive than the grill itself; there’s a cheaper basic version, but it’s currently out of stock. Single-use grills exist, and while they may not be the most practical option for everyday use, if you have one long hike planned and want to do some grilling, this is a good option. The Casus grill can only be used once, of course, but it actually gets fairly hot in about five weber q minutes and stays lit for over an hour. It also has enough space to cook three or four burgers, sausages, dogs, veggies or chicken. Weber still makes our favorite portable grill overall but with so many new models on the market, I wanted to test a few of the other players in the small grill game. Turns out there are some that may be a slightly better fit depending on your grilling goals, including a few that are ultraportable.
That’s big enough to handle burgers and veggies for our family of five. Like the Takibi, the Kamoto doubles as a fire pit when you’re done cooking, which is handy for campsites where ground fires aren’t allowed . It’s also considerably cheaper than the Takibi, though not nearly as well made. While slow-cooking on the Takibi would be challenging, you can at least adjust the grill height to control temperature. It is designed to let heat out the sides, as well as up to the cooking surface, so it’s slightly less efficient than a covered grill, but this is only really a factor when cooking large cuts of meat . I wanted to love this model because the concept is great but it does have some flaws.
Try to get one with a cover for the best temperature control and to prevent burning thicker meats. Try to get enough surface area so you can set up for 2-zone cooking. On the flip side, we didn’t love the lid, which was heavy and felt like it was going to fall off if we didn’t open it carefully enough. The bottom vents were also really hard to access and hot coals fell out if you opened them during the cooking process. The grill also lacks an ash bucket; it does have two ash catches, but they were impossible to clean out without making a mess on my driveway. Unfortunately, while you can arrange the coals inside of it for indirect heat cooking, the Solo Stove’s lack of vents means that you can only use the grill at one temperature.
While it doesn’t come equipped with any handles to help move it from place to place, the AS3000 folds down into a compact enough package to carry from one space to another, when it’s cool. Although the Weber Smokey Joe did a fantastic job of grilling our food, it lacked a few features that would have bumped it up in our rankings. You can get a premium version that has a lid lock, but the basic version provides no way of carrying the grill. That means when it’s full of hot coals, it stays where it lies until it cools down.