One-pound canisters are lightweight, inexpensive, and available at most hardware stores. Lugging around a 20-pound propane cylinder isn’t our idea of portability. If you wind up wanting to use a larger tank, you can purchase an adapter with a Type 1 connector for a 20-pound refillable propane tank. The compact size also created issues when we attempted to roast our kabobs. Closing the lid seemed to stymie airflow to the charcoal, which struggled to stay lit even with both vents wide open. This issue required us to remove and replace the lid periodically, allowing oxygen into the cooking chamber to keep the grill going while cooking our kabobs.
The large grilling area fits up to 15 burgers or 20 sausages so that the entire meal is grilled, and everyone gets to eat, at the same time. She’s an expert on all things home, including kitchen appliances, grills, and other cooking gadgets. We used the Camp Chef Portable Pellet to grill this rack of ribs in high desert winds for 10 hours — the ribs were perfect, and the winds had no effect on cooking performance.
At less than 10 pounds and under 15 inches in diameter, the Smokey Joe was easy to carry and took up little space in the trunk of our car. However, it lacks any sort of mechanism to lock the lid to the base, which forced us to carry it in our arms, which gets messy. There’s also the potential for it to come apart in transit, dumping leftover charcoal bits and ash into the trunk. Weber does make a premium version of the Smokey Joe that has a lid-locking mechanism, but you’ll pay more for it. Some portable grills may come with additional features to make them easier to operate, more convenient, and more useful.
We found the u-shaped burner of the Camp Chef weber charcoal grill to be one of the best single burners in our review. The large surface of the Cuisinart All Foods Roll-Away gives the cook multiple heat zones to work with while grilling. The infrared burner of the Solaire Everywhere heats the entire grill surface to about the same temperature. This is good for cooking lots of one type of food, but not so good if you’re hoping to cook different foods at different rates.
If you’ll be tossing the grill in the back of a pickup truck, any of these models will work. But if you’ve got a conventional car, make sure the grill will fit your trunk’s unique size and weber q shape. The Petit Gourmet has telescoping legs that fold up neatly, and it’s easy to carry in one hand. Models like this are easy to carry into the park to find your ideal picnic spot.