So, let’s break this down. You’re big into charcoal. Or you love the ease of using propane. Or maybe you camp, even in snow, just so you can cook over open flames from aromatic wood straight from the forest floor. All good. Really good. But all good in different ways, resulting in a slightly different flavor and effort on your outdoor cookout. So why shame the pellet grill for being different?
“A lot of people believe it’s cheating,” says Jason Baker, director of Green Mountain Grills (GMG), the leading innovator of pellet grills for the last 15 years. He says the criticism may be because, traditionally, pitmasters—the ultimate title for any serious griller—were those who could coax and tame live fire. “They get coals to the perfect glow, with the perfect amount of smoke. That is an art, and is still a beautiful art,” he says. “It’s amazing to watch those guys feed the fire.”
Most charcoal grills still need someone to fight the flickering temperament of fire throughout the cook to yield a masterpiece. Handling propane flames, however, only needs a bit more attention than a gas stove. Though gas grills do still require a level of awareness for flare-ups, even those concerns have mostly been vanquished by pellet grills. Which is one reason why the pellet grill got labeled the lazy man’s grill.
“It is,” Baker says. “Although I think it’s unfair, because grilling is still a process.” You have to prepare the meats, the marinades, and decide how long and how high on the temps. But once the decisions are made, a pellet grill makes it happen, literally at the touch of a button. It harnesses the powers of electricity, pellet fuel, a computer, and Wi-Fi to manage, feed, and maintain the fire throughout the entire cook.
That’s how pellet grills eliminated what grate jockeys screw up most—temperature fluctuations. In pellet grills, the electricity runs the auger that feeds pellets into a fire box based on the heat sensor data sent to the grill’s computer (10 times every second in a GMG). The controller adjusts the auger rate and the dual fans to stoke or dampen the temperature set by the griller. The computer also gets fed external temps and food temps from the meat probes, all of which the brainy grill, loaded with algorithms, adjusts for to process fuel-feeding and airflow.
The type of fuel plays a part in that too. If it’s a quality pellet, the uniformly shaped, food-grade pieces are pure hardwood, like hickory, apple, cherry, oak, and alder. They’re formed by immense pressure on the pulverized mix of anything from trees, lumber scrap, sawdust, and wood chips that melts the lignin in the wood dust which then glues the particles together. That hardwood mush hardens into solid pellets as it cools in its mold.
Those identical pieces burn uniformly while delivering consistent heat and smoke throughout the device because of the fans and those admirable algorithms. And with no open flames near the food, there’s no risk of flare-ups, if you keep it clean, as pitmasters know well. GMG grills even make cleanup easier with a portal for a shop vac to suck out all the ash, so you walk away smudge-free.
If there was there something you didn’t like about pellet grills, you need to check again. The limitations that even annoyed pellet grillers keep getting knocked out of the park. You can plug them into your car. Take them on the road to tailgate or go camping. And this year, GMG introduced a compact infrared side burner/grate that hits 750̈° for that beloved sear or drops to 150° to keep your sauce warm. They also now have a host of trays and racks that can attach to a metal peg board at the back of the grill for ribs, whole chickens, and such. “We haven’t even thought about things that will become part of that board yet,” Baker says.
So, yes, if you don’t enjoy dancing with the flames and like to hone in on mastering the flavors and the timing of a cook, pellet grills are your dream come true. They let you set complicated cook schedules on your phone and walk away. So, you could set a pork loin to be done at 1:45 p.m. with part of the cook at 150° for a while then at 350° a bit later. “And you can even put another step in there for keeping it warm until you get home,” Baker adds. “You can create that entire profile in the app and that sends it to the grill.”
Okay, that kind of thing makes pellet grills sound as close to grilling robots as we’re going to get for the moment. But they’re not perfect. Like robots, they have a mass of moving parts to create that smooth ease of cooking and moving parts break. But so do cars. And like cars, it only takes a new part to get you going again. “Companies do very well getting parts out quickly and have dealers at-hand to provide parts,” Baker says. “The risk is worth the reward.” Pellet grills also have longer warranties than a typical grill because their parts can be easily swapped out. Read the reviews, because breakdowns are not the norm, and then choose wisely.
Baker says pellet grilling is about respecting your time. “Time is valuable to all of us now,” he says, pointing out that with a pellet grill there’s not even a learning curve on how to ignite, feed, and deal with temperamental wood-fueled flames. “I would argue that when you have an automatic pellet grill, you create time for yourself—without losing flavor.”