The Best Pellet Grills Tested and Reviewed

The best pellet grill occupies a specific niche in the vast grilling landscape. It can provide the quick-start convenience of agas grillwith the smoky flavor of anoffset smoker. Some pellet grills even provide the incredibly high-heat searing capacity of something like a kamado cooker or anoutdoor pizza oven. And they do it all while offering the dialed-in control of a kitchen oven. That’s quite a resume for one item. I don’t want to get on the wrong side of any purists though: Even the best pellet smoker won’t produce the same results as an offset smoker. Wood pellets in a little fire pot don’t produce quite the same intense smoke as chunks ofmesquitein big a firebox. So don’t @ me. For some of you, that slightly reined-in smoke might be a positive. What pellet grillscan dois make smoking and other low-and-slow cooks easy—so easy, in fact, you don’t even have to monitor them.

Though pellet grills are generally more expensive than, say, a charcoal grill, I wanted to look at grills at a variety of price points with a variety of different features. I actually thought everything I tested was good, but read on for the top picks. For more about how I tested, scroll further down.

Table of contents

What is a wood pellet grill
Why should you get a pellet grill
The best pellet grill overall
The best pellet grill for grilling and searing
The best budget pellet grill
How we tested
What we looked for
Other pellet grills we tested
The takeaway

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I know this seems glib, but a wood pellet grill is a grill that burns pellets, specifically compressed hardwood pellets, as opposed tocharcoalor large pieces of wood. An auger turns and moves pellets from a holding hopper to a fire pot where they are ignited. A fan circulates the hot air from the fire in the same way a convection fan does, and a thermostat lets the grill know when it needs to add more fuel to raise the cooking temperature, or stop the pellet flow to allow the temperature to drop.

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Even though it doesn’t produce the same results as an offset smoker orkamado, a pellet grill can come close enough with little to no attention required from you. So if you don’t want to spend eight, nine, or 10 hours monitoring the temperature of a fire, you don’t have to. Pellet grills are also incredibly versatile. Not only do they produce consistent results at smoking temperatures between 225°–250℉, but almost everything I tested easily got hot enough to grill chicken or turkey burgers—and some grills could get hot enough to achieve an excellent sear on rare proteins or makepizza.

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Weber just has a way with grills. In addition to the pellet grill here, the brand also came out on top of both ourcharcoal grillandgas grilltests. When it came to smoking, this was a very close call between the Weber and the Traeger Ironwood (more on that below). Both displayed exceptional temperature control, staying within seven degrees on either side of the desired temperature over the course of a nearly eight hour cook time. Both produced fall-apartribsandpulled porkwith the kind of smoke flavor I’d expect from a good offset smoker. Weber’s Smokeboost feature worked as advertised, adding seriously amped up flavor to the pulled pork (for comparison, I used smokeboost on the pulled pork but not the ribs). Essentially, what it does is keep the grill between 165°–180℉ at the beginning of a cook because it is easier for meat to absorb smoke flavor at lower temperatures.

最终,韦伯小幅Trae战胜ger for little design choices that didn’t have anything to do with the quality of the smoked meat the grill produced. The Smokefire comes with a side handle that makes it easy to wheel around. The Traeger does not. The Smokefire’s front handle is coated in silicone, so I didn’t need to wear gloves to open it when the grill got hot. The Traeger’s metal handle has no coating. The lid of the Weber has a slow close feature that makes it comfortable and controlled to use. It also has built-in lights—this is the first time I’ve ever used a grill with built-in lights, and I am now firmly of the opinion that all grills should have them. All those little things added up to a grill that was just more pleasant to use.

What makes the Weber the best pellet grill overall, though, is its incredible versatility. Weber says it has a temperature range of 200–600℉, but when I cranked it up as high as it could go and measured the internal temperature with an infrared thermometer, it was over 670℉, and it got that hot in just over 10 minutes. The control the grill offers over the low temperatures, combined with its capacity for hot, hot heat means you can cook anything on it. The Smokefire (like theGenesis gas grill) is compatible with theWeber Crafted series of accessoriesthat includes various different cooking surfaces: acast-iron sear grate,a griddle,a grill basket, and even apizza stone.Smokefire grills are also both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi compatible—a feature I took advantage of by actually leaving my house for more than three hours during a cook—and hook up to the Weber Connect app. I find most “smart appliance” apps to be buggy, unnecessary, or both, but Weber’s app stays connected to the grill with very few interruptions, and I found the ability to monitor the progress of a cook from a mile away via the built-in temperature probes quite useful.

The promise of a pellet grill is that it can do everything a charcoal grill can do, just more easily. The Smokefire delivers on that promise in almost every way.

Note that I tested the large Weber Smokefire EX6, but I expect that the smallerSmokefire EX4works just as well with slightly less grilling space.

对许多不同型号的佩尔一个常见问题et grill is that pellets fail to fall from the hopper into the fire pot. That happened sometimes with the Weber, primarily because its hopper is shaped quite differently than pellet hoppers on other grills. The Smokefire’s is a chamber attached to the back of the grill that is sloped. While the location of the hopper is convenient, pellets would sometimes fail to slide down the slope without a little extra push. This isn’t a huge deal—I was still able to cook for several hours without going out to check the grill—but it’s a minor irritation. Also, to get the most out of the high heat capabilities of the grill you really need to buy the rather pricey cast-iron grate—the stainless steel cooking grates work fine, but when I used cast-iron grates on other grills during this test, I could really see the searing improvement they offered.

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If the Oklahoma Joe’s Rider DLX hadn’t run a little hot during the smoking tests (I set it to 225℉ and it ticked up to to 250℉ periodically) it might have won best overall. It produced deeply smoky ribs that won rave reviews—and it could get even hotter than the Weber Smokefire (over 700°F, even though the highest setting on the digital controller was 650℉). It did, however, take almost 30 minutes to reach that temperature. The grill grates on the Rider are made of heavy-duty cast iron, and a lever on the front allows you to switch between smoke and sear mode. In smoke mode, the grill disperses more indirect heat throughout the cooking chamber. In sear mode, the fire pot is sealed off to focus all the heat on a circle in the center of the grill, which is why it can hit such eye-popping temperatures.

The Rider also didn’t suffer stuck pellets in the way that the Smokefire sometimes did. The auger powerfully kept the pellets moving whenever the thermostat called for them, and I never had to worry about poking around in the hopper with a stick.

One underrated advantage of the Oklahoma Joe’s grill is its convenient pellet release system—the best of everything I tested. To empty any extra pellets—something you need to do if you want to, say, switch betweenmesquite pelletsused in one cook andapplewoodused in another—just pull a handle on the side of the hopper and the unspent fuel will fall right into an included storage bucket that attaches to the grill, so you always know where it is.

This pellet grill didn't have any Bluetooth or wifi connectivity, but honestly I didn’t miss it. The digital display was large enough that I could glance at it to keep track of the cook from across the yard, or even from the kitchen window. Like the Weber, it came with four plugs for digital probes, which means you never need to worry about cooking multiple items at the same time. It also has convenient storage for the probes just underneath the control panel, which I thought was a smart touch.

不用去读什么温度上升25的倾向es over its setting didn’t cause major issues with the food I was cooking, but it occurred more often than I expected.

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Cuisinart’s latest entry into the pellet grill world brings a lot of grill for a low(er) price. The Oakmont offers a massive 960 square inches of cooking space—735 on the primary cooking area and another 223 on a higher, secondary level. Compare that with the only comparably priced Traeger grill, which only has 572 square inches. It could hold 31 pounds of pellets in its hopper, compared with a hopper capacity of around 20 pounds on smaller grills. The Cuisinart did present as a less expensive grill—its metal frame, for example, felt thinner. Its wheels were more like those on a really nice office chair than the ones you'd expect on a 200 pound cooking appliance—but its cooking capabilities were still quite good. It got the nod over our other budget contender from Z Grills thanks to its versatility. The Oakmont produced very good ribs, even if it suffered from some of the same temperature spikes as the Oklahoma Joe’s Rider, and had no problem getting hot enough to easily grill a chicken breast, which the Z Grills 450 series struggled to do. It also came with heavy cast-iron grates, which provided beautiful grill marks on the food. The lid on the Oakmont has a huge glass window, which was a mixed bag. It was nice to be able to check on the food as it cooked without opening the door, but it almost certainly impacted the grill’s ability to maintain its heat as evenly as something made of pure metal. The prep shelves on the front and on the side were quite useful, as was the lower storage shelf for holding bags of pellets and other equipment. It can only accommodate two meat probes, but I think that’s enough in the vast majority of cases. For less than half the price of the winning Weber, this is a pellet grill that will still get the job done.

Oakmont无线控制,但它断开连接from my network several times. The app was also a bit buggy—it said the temperature was set to 200°F every time it was opened, even if the grill was set higher. None of that impacted the actual performance of the grill, but it did mean the grill worked better with hands-on operation. Shutting down the grill was also not intuitive—you start the shut down cycle by pressing and holding the dial. It would benefit from having clear, dedicated shutdown and ignite buttons. Finally, this was the most time consuming grill to assemble of everything I tested. The other grills came with most pieces attached already. The Oakmont required a lot more screwing together of parts.

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Upon receiving the grills, I opened them up and assembled them myself, taking note of how long and complicated the process was. Pellet grills, I want to note, are much easier and faster to assemble than offset smokers. They’re more like propane gas grills in that respect. During the initial high-heat burn offs, I set each grill to smoking temperature and clocked how long it took to reach that temperature. I then measured inside the grill using an infrared thermometer to see if the temperature the grill displayed was correct. I then shut down the grills and let them cool before turning them up to their maximum temperature setting, noting how long it took to reach that temperature, and again measuring the actual temperature inside the grill with an infrared thermometer.

I then performed several cooks on each using Traeger Signature Blend pellets. I smoked baby back ribs at 250℉ and pork shoulder at 225℉, using any additional smoke boosting functions on the grills that had them, and checking in on the temperature every 30 minutes. I followed that up by grilling boneless, skinless chicken breasts with the grills set to 450℉ and judging the chicken on its taste, texture, and what kind of grill marks it got. Finally, on the grills that could reach very high temperatures, I seared tuna, looking for deep, dark grill marks, but a beautiful, rare red center.

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It’s not fair to expect any grill to sit at exactly the same temperature over the course of a nine hour cook—we’re dealing with live fire here—but grills that could stay within five to ten degrees of their set temperatures got maximum points.

A great thing about pellet grills is that you can use them as every day cooking devices. I wanted to find one that didn’t take any longer to heat than my oven.

Cookers like gas grills and kamado grills can get incredibly hot, meaning they can cook almost anything. I was hoping to find a pellet grill that could come close to that kind of range.

I didn’t want a grill that made me move pellets around in the hopper myself. Ideally I could just fill the hopper with pellets and not open it again until everything was finished cooking.

Does the grill come with thoughtful touches, like fold-down prep shelves, Wi-Fi capability, different cooking zones, or easy cleanout capabilities?

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Traeger is the biggest name in pellet grills, and for a couple of decades it was the only company that made them. The company’s reputation is well earned andthe Traeger Ironwoodseries that I tested was a great performer. The Ironwood is the middle of the three Traeger lines—theTraeger Pro Seriesis less expensive, and the high endTraeger Timberlineis basically a complete outdoor kitchen. (Traeger also makesportable pellet grillsthat look good, but at Epi we think thebest portable grillsshouldn’t require electricity to operate.)

The racks of ribs and pulled pork from the Traeger were of the same high quality as the winning Weber and the Super Smoke function combined with the downdraft exhaust (it vents out of the back rather than out of a chimney) gave the pork the most smoke flavor of anything I tested. It also grilled beautiful chicken. Traeger’s app, powered by the grill’s WiFire technology, worked seamlessly, and the app’s automatic guided cooks are great for beginners or anyone who doesn’t want to think about what they’re cooking that day.

The Ironwood has a pellet sensor to monitor fuel levels, but the pellets were a little sticky in the hopper. That meant I got several “low pellet” alerts when there were still plenty of them in there. That said, all the alerts from the app were clear and loud, which was not the case for the Weber app. The Ironwood has several other very nice features, like a liner for the drip tray (no mess cleanup below the grates!) and hooks on the back of the grill, where you can store the warming rack when it's not in use. I absolutely recommend the Traeger Ironwood. The Weber got the nod simply for its wider temperature range and better features. But if you don’t need to cook anything at 650℉, the Traeger is an excellent pick.

TheZ Grills 450Bis a bargain when it comes to pellet grills with a price tag under $500. It does feel a bit cheaper than grills like the Oklahoma Joe’s or Weber, but it produced good results in the slow-cooking tests, even if its PID controller did allow the temperature to fluctuate some. The real reason this wasn’t the best budget pick was because it struggled with grilling chicken. It never quite got hot enough to produce nice grill marks and took longer to cook the chicken breast than other grills. If you want an affordable pellet grill for smoking, though, this is still a good choice.

There were no bad pellet grills in this bunch: theWeber Smokefiregets the nod over theTraeger Ironwoodfor its tight control over low temperatures, capacity for high-heat searing, and a litany of smart design choices. If you plan to use your pellet grill primarily for grilling and not smoking,Oklahoma Joe’s Riderseries produced top results. And if you want a good grill at half the cost check out theCuisinart Oakmont.