Gas BBQ grills

[Chadtuba]

I'm in the market for a new propane grill so wanted to see if any of you have any suggestions to head towards or run away from? Budget is $300ish. The grill will live in the garage when not used, and will most likely be covered as well.

As always, much thanks

[Ken Herrick]

I can't offer any advice on brands for you but, I suggest at least a 4 burner model with grating and solid plates and a hood with thermometer. That is a versatile set up that can work well as an oven. (A good thing as the oven in the place I rent is uniseable!)

i use mine for cooking roasts and pizza. A pizza stone which is pre-heated gives a great crust.

Mine with new, full 20lb gas bottle cost me under $200 here in Oz so I would expect you could get a good one for IS$300.

Make sure the legs are not flimsy.

[bisontuba]

Hi-
I just bought a new stainless steel gas 4 burner grill with grates & solid plates, hood with a thermometer, & with a side burner too by CharBroil. It was on sale for $169 + tax ( no propane tank included, but I have two already). Good legs on it too--once assembled which was a hassle!
Great grill BUT what a pain to put together....instructions from Mars.....

Mark

[Donn]

When mine falls apart, I might go for another old second hand Weber. I use mine a lot for roasting coffee. It's about to the point where it could use some replacement parts, and if that works out it's probably good for another decade or who knows.



(Various model names, not necessarily "Genesis".)

They're good, but often people will sell them off cheap, e.g. at yard sales when they're going to move out. A used grill can be pretty grimy, but if you can stand it, eventually it will be covered with your own grime anyway. A new one would be double your price at least. A used one, less than your price for sure, maybe free.

[Rick F]

We got a new grill from Home Depot last year. A Brinkmann grill with 4 burners and a side burner for $199 with free assembly. It has a Porcelain grill surface which makes it easier to clean. It got top reviews from Consumer Reports. However, it does not have the thermometer. It is heavy but has wheels for moving around. We keep ours on the back patio and move it out in the backyard when using. Has built-in ignition on the right hand burner and the side burner. We've had not complaints.



Link if interested:
http://www.homedepot.com/p/t/202656528? ... =202656528

[tofu]

...but I don't understand the point. (I didn't buy it. Mrs. bloke did.)

Here's a thought... Why don't you ASK Mrs. Bloke? Surely you're still on speaking terms with at least her. I mean after all she did marry you for better or worse.

It seems to me that gas grills and the culture of gas grilling (aka "synthetic" barbecuing") are things imported from yankee-land.

Yeah - when in doubt - blame it on the Yankees - apparently we are the new Canadians for being the default for being at fault

- or perhaps we just can't get the hang of Joe's b-b-q cooker for authentic redneck cooking.

[Donn]

I bought mine (for $20 or something, I forget) with the intention to roast coffee, and probably wouldn't have bothered otherwise. It gets some culinary use, though, if only during the summer. There are some factors here that may not come up in the simplest analysis. For example, suppose you get scientific and cook the same menu items two days in a row, once indoors and once outdoors, and sit down to eat them and see what's the difference. Well, what if they aren't any different, but the second day the place doesn't reek with the smell of burning flesh because you did that outdoors? Maybe some people would find that agreeable once in a while for a change. Or maybe it just feels pleasantly like summer because that's when we use the grill (could mean more in the North.)

For pizza, I don't use a stone. I use one with the oven, but grill pizza is a different deal. Get all the ingredients ready and at hand. Slip the dough onto the grill, close the lid, wait a couple minutes. It will puff up a little, dry on top. Open the lid, pick up the crust and turn it over onto a pan, close the lid, quickly assemble the pizza on the cooked side. Slip the pizza back onto the grill and close the lid, turn down the flame a bit, cook until cheese shows the effects. The result will be different than a classic pizza. Crust is dry. Toppings don't cook as much, so choose stuff that benefits from that.

[UDELBR]

"synthetic" barbecuing"

+ eleventy!

[Dan Schultz]

I've had one of these since the 70's when Arkla was located here in Evansville, Indiana. My deceased ex father-in-law was an inspector there and managed to root up enough 'scrap' parts to put together a dozen or so of these and gave them to his kids/friends. I have mine hooked to natural gas so I don't have to mess with the goofy little bottles of Propane.


Still works great and parts for this forty-year-old grill are still abundant and inexpensive.

[tofu]

blah, blah, blah, blah... off my meds again for psychological projection blah,blah,blah-

I actually do get down yonder in the southland a few times a year to fish as I own a house in Cotter, AR "Trout Capital USA" on a bluff overlooking the White River and in view of the rainbow arched Cotter Bridge. My other vacation house is up in Hayward,WI. In the north woods of Wisconsin where there are real trees - not that scrub brush you are calling trees in TN

my c. $50 (charcoal/wood) smoker (not my gas grill) is what is used outdoors 98% of the time,

Smokey Joe - I'm surprised to find out that a guy who is so full of hot air and an inexhaustible supply of smoke to blow up other TubeNetters butts would need to employ a smoker.

On Topic - I too do find outdoor gas cookers kind of perplexing, but get the idea that they don't smoke up the house and are easy to start. Personally I like using wood or charcoal, but two of my houses came with gas grills. One was a Ducane made back when they were a premium brand and not a middle brand now owned by Weber. I think it is going on 25 years. Since I believe in maintenance it is easy to keep these going a long time. This one and the other one, a Weber Genesis, run on natural gas. It seems that you either pay a little or you pay a lot to get your money's worth in gas grills. The ones in the middle don't seem to last longer than the cheap ones and are just cheap imitations of expensive ones (crappy stainless steel) etc. If you plan to move in the not to distant future I think you could easily find something for $199 that would do the job. People are always throwing out old Weber charcoal grills and in many cases just because the paint has faded or the grills are cruddy. These are easily cleaned up with a decent powerwasher or a wirebrush and a little elbow grease. If you need to paint it high temp pain for this app is cheap and replacement grates are cheap and readily available. I've bought them at the local FarmandFleet and I'm sure HomeDump has them as well. They work well and you got so little invested if you move you can just leave it behind if you don't want to haul it to your new place. Why spend money you don't need to.

[Ken Herrick]

I can understand what Joe is saying and, to a degree, agree with him. For me it is a matter of a tool to do certain jobs which can be very convenient if entertaining outdoors.

I really prefer to use the little Weber, charcoal, table top BBQ if I want a really good steak for 1 - 3 people. A nice 2" T-bone, with a hint of ted wine marinade and a touch of hickory smoke suits me fine. Oh damn, now I'm getting hungry.

[tofu]

You've picked a beautiful area for a vacation home.

It's truly a wonderful area - and it costs a fraction to live down there versus up here, but I didn't pick it.

My mother's older cousin Bill was a talented electrical engineer for Motorola. His mother Elsie (my grandmother's older sister) was a mean woman. I don't know why and suspect it was a result of an abusive alcoholic husband who died from it in his '30s -way before my time. My folks were very gracious people who always invited them to all the family gatherings and holidays. She was mean to everybody - so in case nobody else had noticed - at the age of 3 I stood up at the Thanksgiving Day dinner just as my father was about to carve the turkey and announced for all to hear that she was the wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz. She was convinced my dad had put me up to it. She kept a solid lid on her only child Bill and he lived at home until he was 50. They lived on the west side of Chicago in the Garfield Park area and even when the area rapidly started to deteriorate she stubbornly refused to move. He was 50 when she died.

Within one month he buried her, sold the house, married the woman he had been secretly seeing behind his mothers back for a decade, retired from Motorola and moved to Cotter. I have no idea how he picked Cotter other than he liked to fish. I was about 10 when this went down. The neighbors across the street from my folks house were teachers and they had a place down in the Ozarks that they summered at and would eventually retire to. So I would bum a ride at the end of the school year from them and spend most of the summer down in Cotter. I would either come back with the teachers or my moms cousin (whom I always called Uncle Bill) drove me back north. The teachers drove an old Chevy and never went past 50mph - Uncle Bill had a 1958 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible (land yacht) he bought second hand - he thought the speed limit started at 100 mph. I preferred riding in that fast Caddy - my mother knew Uncle Bill was crazy fast so she wanted me in the teachers old Chevy. I usually managed to get back in that Caddy. I did that for many summers and thought of it as my Huck Finn years -minus the Mississippi. Uncle BIll and wife Rose ended up being married for almost 40 years living down there and it was like they had been born there. In my mind he had two separate completely different lives.

So unbeknownst to me he left the place to me. His lawyer was a retired Baxter County judge in Mountain Home. When I went down there to sign the estate papers I noticed he had a lot of Civil War stuff in the office. I asked him if he was a civil war buff. He said yes and that he had his own cannon and did Civil War re-enactments -so I mentioned I was in a Light Guard Band that dated back to 1859 and we often played at re-enactments. I asked him how they handled the south losing. He replied they only did battles the south won -but they had a hard time staging battles. I asked why -he replied:

Nobody wants to be a Damn Yankee!

[Chadtuba]

Any thoughts on this bad boy: http://www.samsclub.com/sams/smoke-holl ... navAction= It seems to be fairly highly regarded as a do it all on the grilling forums, plus in the store it's only $270 vs. the $349 online.

[tofu]

Any thoughts on this bad boy: http://www.samsclub.com/sams/smoke-holl ... navAction= It seems to be fairly highly regarded as a do it all on the grilling forums, plus in the store it's only $270 vs. the $349 online.

Is there an ALDI by you? I was in one tonight and they had a generic one with the minimal bad stainless steel. Had the thermometer in the hood, electronic ignition, 4 separate control knobs and even had a side burner - for $139. For $139 it was a bargain. It's LP if that is what you're looking for.

off-topic At least at the ALDI's by me the stuff imported from Germany is excellent. What they have from Germany does vary from month to month but the quality is first rate and the price is a bargain. The non-german stuff does range from less than ok to excellent so buyer beware.

[MaryAnn]

Resurrecting but changing:
I'll be buying a propane STOVE in a few months, for indoor kitchen use. They want lotsa money to put in a gas line, while I can stub out a line to hook up a propane tank to pretty easily. I've been cooking on propane in the RV for quite some time now, and also did quite a bit on a Coleman camp stove. Problem is, neither of those will go low enough to simmer. They boil, or they boil hard; they don't simmer, like to cook rice. Do any of you guys have experience with a propane kitchen stove, like out in the country with no natgas, and it works on simmer?

And to the obvious query: I hate electric stoves; you can't turn down the flame and get a reduction in heat right off. You have to change "burners," or wait forever, and I find them no more usable than a campfire.

And to the other obvious query: everything I've read about induction stoves makes me not want one.

MA

[Ken Herrick]

Hi MA,

A proper kitchen stove built to run on propane should work as well as any other
gas stove. The burners are slightly different than for natural gas. Just make sure the one you buy is built for the specific fuel you use. An important part of the set up is a proper regulator.

I've been cooking with propane fueled stoves for decades with no problems, including flame control.

Installation is "simple" but here I'd generally be inclined to have a licenced gas fitter do it (a legal & insurance requirement here in OZ.) Get the right gear and tou'll be "cookin with gas".