Getting your hands dirty with charcoal, tweaking vents and chimneys to stop chunks of oak from flaring up and destroying your brisket, exerting your will over the heat inside a big metal box—barbecue takes a lot of practice. Or at least it used to.
The millenia-old quest to control fire may be nearing its apotheosis as technology has finally come for some one of the oldest cooking techniques out there.
Take a sauce-fueled road trip through the Carolinas, experience the Super Bowl of Swine, plan your next big cookout, and more.
Look, Mom, no hands!
The grilling world has taken increasingly large steps in this direction since the 1980s when Joe Traeger (of Traeger fame) first repurposed wood pellets intended for home heating into cooking fuel with a homemade pellet grill.
Pellet grills, which burn what are essentially compressed wood shavings, hold their temperatures constant with a combination of fans, thermostats, and mechanical augurs (big screws that move the pellets around). And I’ve personally found them useful during a time in my life when my small children could pull my attention from dinner prep at any moment.
But I’ve also always considered pellets the bumper-bowling of wood-fired cooking. The whole process is designed to turn a very hands-on style process into something you can set and forget if you so choose. And using what looks like a giant pile of gerbil food for half-day cooking projects just feels like cheating.
The reason a pellet grill can self-regulate its temperature so well is because its fire source is actually quite small. The flame is contained in a small pot about the size of a takeout container. So once it gets up to temp, the augur stops turning and new pellets stop dropping into the pot until they’re needed. It’s the live-fire-cooking version of a controlled burn.
The next step in this move toward automation came near the end of 2019 when Masterbuilt released its gravity-fed grill. A gravity-fed grill operates much like a pellet grill, but it uses a hopper full of charcoal briquettes instead of wood pellets. As the bottom of the pile burns out, new charcoal falls from the hopper (because gravity!) to refuel the fire as needed. The machines in Masterbuilt’s Gravity Series also use a fan to stoke or dampen a fire and offer great temperature control within a wide range—between 225℉ and 700℉.
Both pellet grills and gravity-fed grills operate more like an oven than a traditional barbecue; they have a smaller fire source that shoots heat through the cooking chamber but doesn’t expose food directly to a charcoal fire. Now, however, outdoor cooking brands are making it possible for home BBQs to precisely hold a big ol’ pile of charcoal and wood at temperature, giving grillers more control over their live-fire cooking than ever before.
Tech comes for classic charcoal cooking
Kamado Joe’s Konnected Joe, released in 2023, has strapped upgrades onto its traditional kamado, a heavy clay vessel that naturally holds very consistent temperatures thanks to its excellent insulation. Thanks to an electric igniter, a metal hot rod (to light the charcoal), a thermostat (to set the temperature), and, like a pellet grill, a fan to control the air flow and keep the heat steady, this innovative version of the classic cooker lets your fingertips control the cooking process instead of gloved hands. Push a button on the grill to ignite the automatic firestarter (for safety reasons, none of these grills let you start a fire remotely), then set and change the temperature with an app like you were adjusting the volume of a smart speaker.
Newest to the world of techy adaptations of old-school techniques is the biggest name in charcoal grilling, Weber. Its new Smart Performer builds on the design of its iconic kettle grill by adding a fan system and other automated features. A temperature probe at the top of the kettle triggers a fan to increase or decrease to adjust airflow, and an onboard thermometer can measure the progress of your cook. You can watch all of this from your phone screen.
"I was making ribs and was able to set up my cook, then go on a hike with my son," Nick Nanos, Weber’s senior director of product management, says of his experience with the Smart Performer. "That pain point of having to be at the grill, adjusting your dampers, is something that we felt hasn't been touched in over 10 years."
According to Nanos, these futuristic additions were a direct response to demand from a new generation of consumers. “There are some people who are your typical charcoal users who just love the craft. But then there’s a younger demographic that wants some of that, but also wants the precision and control they get from a smart oven or pellet grill,” he says.
I've tested both the Smart Performer and the Konnected Joe, and what wowed me most about these digital takes on analog cooking is just how long they’ll hold temperatures both high and low. Set at 250℉, each were able to maintain the low temperature for hours without any intervention from me—I just sat inside and watched the flat line on a temperature graph.
With just a bit of experience, a griller can definitely get that kind of low and slow consistency with a well-insulated offset cooker or tech-free kamado, but it takes more practice to keep temps steady when they're high. So, even more impressive to me is the way these grills can hold hot flames stable. I set each to 500 degrees to see if they could keep that temp without the charcoal starting to burn out of control. Not only did the temperature remain constant, but the system did a good job conserving charcoal, giving me well over an hour of cooking time. When I opened the lid to flip my proteins, the temperature dropped as hot air was released. But once closed again, the fans kicked on and quickly brought the internal temperature back to 500℉, where it stayed.
What sorcery makes this work? According to Weber’s engineering manager Ryan Lundgren, the answer is in the air. The air flow, he says, will adjust to either smother a fire that’s too hot or stoke a fire that’s too cool. The fan that makes this happen in Weber’s grill “has a ton of settings—655 to choose from. It will slowly find the perfect one and just lock it there until you adjust it.” It sounds relatively simple, but that level of automatic micro-adjustment just wasn’t possible until recently. It's science, not magic.
What’s next?
When speaking about Weber's recent releases, Nanos makes clear that the brand's goal has never been to get techy for tech's sake. "We don't [increase] searing temperatures just to say we sear to the highest temperature. We do things because we want to produce the best outcome for our consumers," he says. "We want to enhance the [grilling] experience and make it easier...and less intimidating."
Weber and Kamado Joe have cracked the (cheat) code on charcoal grilling—so how can additional innovations in outdoor cooking make it even easier for backyard barbecuers to achieve pro-level results at home? By bringing other modes of indoor precision cooking outdoors. For instance, in just the last few months a fully induction-heated flat top griddle—not unlike the induction ranges that have made kitchens more efficient in recent years—has come online with promises of cutting propane tanks out of your life entirely.
Smart tech can already automatically adjust the grind of your coffee beans and temperature of your oven to achieve pre-set results. One day soon, will it be able to model a brisket stall and calibrate one of these smart smokers to push it through to completion at the press of a button? (Maybe it'll even be run by artificial intelligence! If nothing else, that would be a more useful and friendlier application for the technology than aggressive facial recognition.)
Whatever does come next, I don’t think I’m going back to a tech-free grilling experience. Even as someone who tries to keep the number of apps on his phone and in his home to a minimum, the baby back ribs that came off the Konnected Kamado and their perfect smoke ring won me over. The smoke, the char, the flavor—the reasons for cooking with live fire in the first place—are there in ways even the best pellet grills struggle to produce. Sometimes it’s OK to take the easy way out.
