In our tests, steak and chicken cooked quickly and got nice char marks without any flare-ups. Ash falls through the coal holder holes onto the bottom of the grill for a neat grilling experience, and the stainless grill grate is small and easy to wash in your sink once you get home. You can read more about how we evaluate portable grills in our Lab and consumer tests — plus everything you need to know to shop for your perfect grill — at the end of this guide. Check out our guide to best grilling accessories and how to clean your grill to get it ready for grilling. The Coleman is super lightweight clocking in at just over 10 pounds which makes it an ideal grill to take camping, hiking or on a boat. It’s also exceptionally portable, flipping up into a package no bigger than a large purse or day bag.
A lightweight steel lid and three insulating walls give it the ability to both block wind and retain heat, allowing you to cook in less-than-ideal weather. This model cools down almost as quickly as it heats up for a quick get-away, with a locking lid and enough space to store one-pound gas canisters. This Weber grill is a mini version of the brand’s weber q well-loved charcoal kettle. Testers appreciated the solid but portable build and how quickly they were able to set it up. The fact that the carrying handle doubles as a lid holder is also useful for keeping an eye on the food when cooking. That aside, foods cooked fairly evenly and sported aesthetically pleasing grill marks in our tests.
There are more types of small grills now using every fuel source imaginable, including the sun. Portable grills are perfect for campers, city folks living in apartments and anyone without a big backyard or who finds themselves often on the move. To determine scores in this metric, we loaded each product into vehicles, took them to picnics and campsites, and grilled gratifying culinary concoctions.
Note, that you should remove as much grease as possible before burying the grill. Grill all the good stuff, no matter where this summer takes you, with a high-performance portable grill. The design of the Camp Chef Portable Pellet is practically unaffected by wind. The burner is deep within the tub of the grill body so it’s protected by the walls of the grill, the heat distributor, and the lid.
Like the PKGO, the NOMAD can function as a closed grill, or you can use each side independently as a hibachi-style cooker, doubling the cooking space. The magnetic grates stay in place when transported, are slightly domed for strength, and weber genesis 2 can invert for use as a vegetable cooker basket. Still, we found it heated quickly and was ready to cook in 10 minutes after adding lit charcoal from a chimney, while side vents gave us greater control over lower-temperature cooking.
Charcoal, with its inherent messiness, may not be ideal depending on your portable grill needs but this is a workhorse that will get the job done and last you a good while. Plus, it clocks in at a budget-friendly $48 (for the black model), making it my pick for the best cheap portable charcoal grill. The Cuisinart Petite Gourmet is one of the smallest grills in our tests, and the size does affect control. It has a fairly uniform temperature, but the shape of the grate and burner gives you the option to move your food around to different temperature zones in case you are needing some range for different foods.
If you are cooking a variety of foods all at once, you might prefer different temperature zones. To test the distribution of heat across a grill, we grilled different food types in different corners of the grill. We rated the grills on ease of cleaning, including dumping any ash and unused charcoal for applicable models. After rating the grills’ overall performances in these areas, we looked at those scores and weighed them against their retail prices. Rating each area on a scale of one to five, we averaged the category scores to arrive at the final score for each grill. Since food has to be loaded into a tube, you can’t really cook many of the traditional barbecue meats such as ribs.
For gas, we looked at the number of BTUs (British thermal units) each product generates. For charcoal, electric, and pellet options that cannot be measured the same way, we drew upon evidence from testing and an infrared thermometer to measure internal grill temperatures. We also factored in the number of burners of each product, how well the grill body insulated heat and the volume of the weber charcoal grill coal bed. The Solaire Everywhere infrared grill is a unique product on our roster and performs very well in a few categories. First, it is very small and compact, and its construction is tight and carries quietly. Most importantly, the high-powered ceramic “flameless” burner that sits below a carefully designed grate of v-shaped bars cooks steaks better than anything else in our review.