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Decided to give pellet grills a shot after years of sticking with charcoal
I've been running a Weber kettle for close to 15 years now and always figured pellet smokers were just fancy electric ovens with smoke tubes. A buddy let me borrow his Traeger for a brisket cook last summer and that thing held 225 for 14 hours without me touching it once. Anyone else cave on a pellet grill after swearing by charcoal forever?
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kelly_miller8029d ago
My neighbor just bought a top of the line pellet grill last month and spent more on that thing than I did on my first car. Last weekend his auger jammed up during a pork shoulder cook and he was over at my house at 6am asking to borrow my kettle. That's the thing I see everywhere now, not just with grills but with everything from lawn mowers to coffee makers. People pay extra for convenience and automation but they forget that simple stuff just works and keeps working. I fix enough fancy smart home thermostats for customers to know that adding electronics to something that worked fine for decades is usually a bad bet in the long run. Don't get me wrong, I get the appeal of set it and forget it, but there's something to be said for knowing your equipment well enough to fix it with a screwdriver and a trip to the hardware store.
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grant.jade1mo ago
Oh man, I gotta push back hard on this. Pellet grills are basically cheating. You're paying a premium for something that does all the work for you and the smoke flavor is weak compared to a good charcoal fire. I've had food off a dozen different pellet smokers and it always tastes like it was cooked in a convection oven with a hint of campfire, not real smoke. And when that controller or auger breaks on you in the middle of a cook you're totally screwed, while my old kettle just needs a bag of charcoal and a match to keep going. I'd rather tend a fire for 14 hours and get that real bark and flavor than trust some circuit board to not mess up my brisket.
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