GoKawiilGrilling is primal. Barbecue is primal. It is fire, smoke, and meat. It is the delicate sense for the proper placement of a pork butt, the soft give of a medium-rare steak, and the feel of a perfectly cooked brisket when you heft it with one hand.
It is a matter of perception, and Zen, to puzzle out how much you might need to vent your grill to feed the orange-red embers of your carefully pyramidal lump charcoal on a kettle- or kamado-style grill. It requires constant attention to keep this temperature stable, a balance between waning embers and nourishing oxygen. Perfection, over long cooks, might be the work of a life.
Or how about forget all that? How about you instead hook up some temperature probes and snuggle up an app-controlled fan to the bottom vent? How about you make perfect steak every time? Perfect pork belly, perfect pork butt, perfect ribs and chuck and loin and leg? What I want is for the meat to taste good, and I usually need as much help as I can get.
That’s how I found myself with wireless probes stuck up some party ribs, drinking a beer while my phone told me how soon they’d be ready to come out of a slightly overheating Kamado Joe.
A new world of aftermarket tech has made it possible to turn almost any grill into an app-connected smart grill that you can turn up and down like an oven—simply by using a phone app to modulate air moving across the coals. My favorite, the Venom digital temperature controller ($280), does this for the most ubiquitous grill in America, the Weber Kettle. Competitor ChefsTemp makes modular controllers and fans that can adapt to a good portion of the rest, including MasterKettle, Kamado Joe, Big Green Egg, Old Country Smoker, and Akorn.
It's almost like I no longer have an excuse if I don't cook perfect meat in my backyard. Or at least, this is the hypothesis my fellow reviewers and I put to the test this spring.
Buy Dumb Grills. Make Them Smart.
The team at WIRED has been testing grills for a decade or more. Many of my colleagues' and my top grill picks are sophisticated, all-in-one smart cookers. They are beautiful, $1,000-plus machines, like our favorite Recteq 1600 pellet smoker with built-in probes, sensors, and venting systems.
But the more complicated something gets, the more failure points you introduce. Some smart grills can be black boxes or require a bit of troubleshooting with the manufacturer. Apps, like the one for the somewhat ironically named Lifetime grills, might be discontinued with little notice, leaving your grill no longer working as well as the one you bought. For grills whose longevity is heavily reliant on apps and sensors, I tend to stick with brands like Weber, Traeger, and Recteq, whose longevity is more assured.
But arguably the most resilient path is to keep your grill dumb but soup it up with new and upgradable tech—the same way you can turn an old Honda Civic into a street racer. This way, you can always upgrade your controller without having to swap out the grill itself.