Charcoal briquettes and lump charcoal are easier to ignite and keep lit than ordinary firewood. And if you plan to cook low and slow we suggest adding a few chunks of hardwood to your charcoal pile. This brings about more smoke flavor in barbecue meat like pork ribs, pork butt and beef brisket. Simple construction means there aren’t too many parts to assemble or too many features to handle while cooking.
After the grill was heated up for 10 minutes, the steaks were ready to hit the grill grate. The PK Grills company has recognized the need for an update, and in February 2017, it launched the PK360, a bigger, slicker design with front access vents and a better lid attachment. It still has no significant backstop for the grates, however, and no bottom tray for catching ash—which means it just kind of pours out on the ground. And at $750 at the time of writing, it was beyond our price consideration. Over the course of two days, we put three charcoal grills through a battery of tests. From burgers to chicken to slow-smoked ribs, this Weber model’s time-tested design produces great results—at a terrific price.
There’s nothing quite like the simple pleasure of cooking over charcoal on a nice grill like this. If you’ve never cooked with charcoal before, the Original Kettle is an excellent grill for discovering this style of barbecue. That doesn’t mean all charcoal grills are created equal, however. This is a superior grill to most on the market — it’s built to function and to last, and it’s worth every penny. And, yes, I totally love those few features; not having to hand-scoop the ash is a blessing, and the lid hook will save you from dents and scratches. Plus, the size-to-weight ratio is fabulous; there’s a lot of grate space, but it’s light enough to move it around to wherever I feel like grilling.
The gas ignition makes lighting coal as easy as pushing a button. With a push of a button, the coals are lit, and the essence of BBQ fills the air. The Performer® Deluxe charcoal grill performs from beginning to end. Light coals with the Touch-N-Go gas ignition, prep weber q food on the large work table, and know that cleanup will be easy with the One-Touch™ cleaning system. Clean the cooking grate as you would any other grate — use a good grill cleaning tool to remove food debris (when it’s still warm), but don’t use anything metal.
Each grill did a great job searing the chicken leg quarters while still leaving them juicy on the inside. The Oklahoma Joe’s Kettle Grill and Weber Original Kettle Grills gave the chicken skin the deepest weber q sear. The lack of a simple lid hook feels like a design oversight and removing and replacing the ash catcher isn’t as smooth as it should be because the damper handle gets caught on the legs.
And this updated model, when we used the charcoal snake method, demonstrated temperature control almost as good as the Weber. The 22-inch Napoleon Rodeo Charcoal Kettle Grill (model number NK22CK-L) is considered one of the better Weber clones available (the pros at AmazingRibs.com, among others, rate it highly). In our cooking tests it performed well, though not quite as well as the Weber. In particular, we didn’t portable bbq find its unique heat-diffusing plate—a shallow metal dome that sits in the middle of the coal bed—to be as effective as we would have liked. However, at 34 inches at the grates, it’s nearly counter height, and a full 7 inches taller than the Weber, so it was less tiring to work on. The Napoleon’s four legs, versus the Weber’s three, make this grill more stiff and stable, and allow for a nice big shelf underneath.