The frame was surprisingly sturdy and did a great job at high-heat cooking, but because there are no vents or lid, it didn’t do well on the chicken tests. There was no way to control the heat, so the chicken either burned over direct heat without cooking through inside or it was still undercooked after an hour over indirect heat. You also can’t move the grill until it completely cools down, and the ashes blow around everywhere because it lacks an ash catcher bucket. It’s a great grill if you’re looking for a cheap way to cook hotdogs at the beach, but we wouldn’t recommend it for heavy-duty use. If our top gas pick is out of stock, or you’re looking for a portable grill that’s well suited for cooking for a crowd, we recommend the Weber Traveler Portable Gas Grill.
It’s hard to beat a Weber kettle, but Napoleon holds its own and adds some unique features to make the 22″ Pro Cart a viable alternative. Our most important source of sustenance is people who join our Pitmaster Club. Click below to see all the portable bbq benefits, take a free 30 day trial, and help keep this site alive. Secondly, you need to look out for the grill size with these portable units – as well as how much they weigh if you really are after something you can carry down to the beach.
If you’re solely interested in cooking, lump charcoal would be a faster way to get to grilling over a bed of coals. Setting the grill bridge about four inches up worked nicely for us, with our burgers right over the coals. Chicken on the bone needs to be set a little higher to be sure it cooks evenly. With the Takibi, once the cooking is done, remove the grill bridge, throw on some more wood, and you’ve already got your campfire going. The Lodge Cast Iron Sportsman’s Grill L410 is a longtime favorite of Wirecutter senior staff writer Lesley Stockton for its intense heat.
For the gas grills, we also placed slices of white bread over the entire surface to map out the heating pattern. Grills with even heating really shined here, creating predictable patterns without noticeable hot or cold spots. The Biolite’s grill surface is only about 130 square inches, so it isn’t as large as some of the other portable grills we tested for this guide.
(I was able to get up to 592 degrees off a digital thermometer.) There’s very little smoke, though I do suggest using it in a well-ventilated area if you’re indoors. I grilled everything from pork chops to asparagus and was quite happy with the results. If you want to expand the City Grill’s capabilities, you can buy a flat top surface for $135 that you can use to cook up a pancake breakfast. No thermometer is included, and Weber does not make a storage cover for the Jumbo Joe. If you want to do any indirect-heat cooking, you’ll want to buy the hinged grill grate for $35 so you can feed in fresh fuel without removing the top grill, and the $23 charcoal basket is also useful.
This will ensure that your food doesn’t stick to the grill plates. I haven’t used the fancier models, but this basic four-serving one served me well for years. You can pull the grills out for easy cleaning, there’s a drip pan to catch all the grease, and if you’re not in the grilling mood, it doubles as a Panini press. We barbecued for weeks to find the right charcoal and propane grills for road trips—or just for smaller homes. Heavy and not very portable, the Davy Crockett’s lack of wheels and handles made it difficult to move around. But our biggest complaint was that the grill was extremely noisy during use.
Most pellet grills use a deflector plate to produce indirect heat, allowing your food to cook evenly. AS3000 has a deflector plate, however, the plate has a sliding door built into it to allow direct access to grill’s flames if you want to sear items like burgers and steaks. Unfortunately, when closed, the sliding door allows more heat to pass through it than the rest of the deflector plate does. This had us moving chicken drumsticks around the AS3000’s cooking surface to ensure that they all cooked evenly. This Weber grill is a mini version of the brand’s well-loved charcoal kettle. Testers appreciated the solid but portable build and how quickly they were able to set it up.
We’ve also noted some models we’re interested in for our next round of testing in 2022. Good Housekeeping participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites. With a body made from two powder-coated sheets of carbon steel, it turns from a closed form to a grill in seconds.