After looking at many factors, here’s our list of the best fire pits this season. Greg Baker is an award-winning chef, restaurateur, and food writer with decades of experience in the food industry. His written work appears in Food & Wine, Food Republic, and other publications. With proper maintenance, this griddle should last you for many years and many cookouts for your friends and family.
When you get to where you are going, slide the four pieces together and boom, instant fire pit with a grill top for burgers. The griddle’s versatility allows it to shine where a grill may fall short. It can cook a range of foods that a grill cannot without accessories – pancakes, omelets, loose vegetables, and so much more. You’ve got to treat it like a large cast iron skillet to keep it from rusting. The good news is once you get used to cleaning it, it just becomes part of the process and the cook surface maintains a constant, protective coating. I kept the left two burners at a lower heat while keeping the right two burners on high.
I used a two-gallon bucket filled with Traeger signature blend wood pellets as the fuel and two shot glasses of Kingsford lighter fluid as the accelerant. We then timed how long the fire took to reach full flame and how long it took from ignition to the flame going out. We found a hot spot over the searing grate, on the top of the firebox, which didn’t pit boss flat top affect our cooking except when baking pizza. It’s a great grill for searing, which takes moving a lever on the heat diffuser. Of all the grills we tested, only the Yoder model yielded dark grill marks. The Yoder produced a good amount of smoke in all of our tests, though this almost understates its exceptional performance in our long smoke test.
Bluetooth app connectivity and a feature-rich control panel make this a straightforward unit to operate. The features and performance balance the price, giving it good scores on our value rating. The most expensive grill on this list, the Timberline has a high cost-to-value ratio.
It has some hot spots that result in slightly uneven cooking, but this is a good entry-point pellet grill at a reasonable price. At first look, pellet grills are solid appliances that can weather the elements, but their construction can vary. Stainless steel holds up better pit boss flat top over time than carbon steel and powdered steel as it resists corrosion. If you’re considering longevity, stainless steel is also the ideal material for grill parts, from grates to grease trays to fire burn pots. Setup doesn’t get much easier than this Louisiana Grills model.
The steel surface is porous whereas the ceramic griddle is sealed. The 4.7mm thick cast iron griddle surface performs well, although Pit Boss recently released an add-on ceramic griddle top which we’ll cover later in the review. The PB4BGD2 perfectly blends power, portability and precision to create a one-of-a-kind grilling machine that delivers a Bigger. I can’t say for sure, but I think the cool spot on the left side of the griddle is due to the design of the left burner on the 3 burner model.