What is the best grill smoker combo – Summer 2023
Last Updated Jan 2023 – Its summer time – your kitchen feels cramped and lonely because everyone else is enjoying the open space of the garden with an ice-cold beer. You start to dream of a cooking space near a real fire. Cooking tasty racks of ribs… outside – like a Neanderthal. Well stop your whining and get out there – start a fire, cook some meat, drink a beer and beat your chest.
But so you don’t look like a complete idiot you should really cook your food on a wood pellet grill BBQ. But finding the best smoker grill combo can be tough. As there are thousands of different smoker grill combo out there, it might seem a hassle to pick the best smoker grill combo according to your needs. Here at On The Gas we have done a bit of research and come up with our top 5/6 Grill Smokers so you can roast, grill, smoke and burn things to your hearts content.
#1: Smoke Hollow 4 – in – 1 LP Gas Charcoal Smoker and Grill Review
The Smoke Hollow 4-in-1 LP Gas Charcoal Smoker Searing BBQ comes with great customer reviews. As you would imagine this jumbo Smoker Grill combo is a massive chunky beast which will dominate its cooking area in your back yard let alone make all other smoker grill combo look like kids toys.
Seriously this unit has it all – you are well and truly smokin. With the ability to wood pellet grill this one is value for every dime spent. And because of wood pellets, it’s quality reaches a level higher. It is made with top-quality, durable materials, and you can take the afternoon to put it all together aided by the instructions (seriously who reads instructions), a box of beer and a few mates. You can find it easily. Best price is on Amazon, shipping included.
#2: MEDINA RIVER OUTDOORS 67 JUMBO SMOKER/GRILL COMBO
The Medina River Outdoors 67 is a high-end, jumbo grill smoker combo with great customer reviews. As you would imagine this jumbo Smoker Grill combo is a massive chunky beast that will dominate its space in your back yard let alone make all other Grill Smoker combos look like kids toys. It has a huge 40×20 inch cooking grill and the 20×20 inch smoker is big enough to crawl inside of if you get cold. Both of these 40×20 and 20×20 cooking machines give out value for their money for years to come.
It is made with top-quality, durable materials, and you can take the afternoon to put it all together aided by the instructions (seriously who reads instructions), a box of beer and a few friends. It’s also easy to find. Best price is on Amazon, shipping included.
# 3: Medina River Outdoors 65 Patio Small Smoker/Gill Combo
If you liked the sound of the Medina River 67 Jumbo, but let out a sigh of longing after you read it because that giant would never squeeze into your shoebox garden, then check out the Medina River Outdoors 65 or the Medina River Outdoors 60.
This is the BBQ Grill Smoker combo for the small patio garden. It has all the same greatness as its Jumbo cousin, but it’s compact. Who said size matters? This sturdy piece of hardware will happily impress a group of your closest friends. And perhaps this could be the best grill for your price range.
#4: The Char-Griller 5050 Duo Gas-and-Charcoal Griller
This dual charcoal and propane gas griller falls at the affordable end of the price range of BBQ Grill Smokers. For quick every-day outdoor cooking area grills, cooking is as easy as turning on the gas.
If you want to have a more authentic BBQ experience with smoky flavor, the charcoal option gives you that satisfying char-grilled taste and leaves you plenty of time to kick back with a beer while you wait for dinner to be served. It’s also easy to use. This combo grill fetches a value for its money. You can use a wood pellet or multiple wood pellets for a more smoky experience.
The Char-Griller Duo is a great starter kit for someone exploring the idea of a permanent outdoor kitchen. To discover the joys of gasoline and charcoal combined.
#5: The Char-Griller Trio – Gas/Charcoal Grill and Smoker
The Char-Griller Trio incorporates a smoker alongside the gas and charcoal grills of the 5050 Char- Griller Duo.
This model is for the person who can’t wait to try his hand at everything. Grilling and smoking meats and fish is good fun, not to mention delicious. This is also an easy to use griller, so anyone can use it.
It significantly broadens your cooking space options too – so bring on those fancy recipes, you’ll make them look easy. You can buy this Trio Combo from Amazon, shipping included.
#6: The Landmann 590135 Black Dog 42XT BBQ Charcoal Grill and Smoker
The Landmann 590135 Black Dog satisfies two hobbies for the outdoor man: BBQing and tinkering with gadgets. This is the dream BBQ Grill Smoker for the kind of person who can’t resist making personal improvements on the manufacturer’s design. Grilling and smoking with this machine is more fun then you can think.
You could use a griller like this on your cooking are. The Black Dog is a hefty piece of equipment (although still remarkably mobile), which can handle your tinkering. It easily reaches and maintains a high-temperature, perfect for a good smoker, and you have a broad choice of cooking methods: smoke, indirect heat or pellet grill. You can control the temperature with a digital temperature gauge.
Who knew how many choices there could be?! The right BBQ Grill Smoker will call out to you, whether you want the best of the beasts or a compact grilling companion.
When you’re working with this much heat, you need to know what you’re doing – but trust your instinct!
How To Choose Between These Options:
Which Type Of Grill Is Best?
To search the best between these grills can be tough, especially with all of the adjustable terminology that gets thrown around. If you’re not an expert camp chef, it can be really confusing to choose between gasoline and charcoal or understand how you’re supposed to use smoker box parts.
Though you don’t need to be a camp chef to grill, there are some things that are better if you know them. For example, the biggest difference between the grills above is the availability of all of these cooking modes. In order to choose the correct model for your backyard, it’s important to understand the difference between all of the ways you can use your smoker grills.
Gas Versus Charcoal
Having the best smoker grill combo can prove to be rough at times. There are purists out there that will tell you that you should do all of your backyard cooking with charcoal. They’re wrong. While there are certainly a number of advantages bestowed by using solid fuel to cook your meats, gasoline allows a number of advantages as well. In fact, it’s probably better for most households.
Gasoline grills don’t actually turn very hot, at least as far as cooking is concerned. Your maximum temperature control on most gasoline grills is going to be just over 500 degrees. This is more than adequate for almost all cooking you’ll do on your grill — you’ll seldom go over 300. Heck, the definition for barbeque is “slow cooking over low indirect heat.” You’ll often set your smoker grill to no more than 220 F and let a choice cut of meat cook for hours. But this grill will be a good addition to your cooking area.
When it comes to searing meats, however, gas grills usually don’t cut it. Some speciality restaurant grills come with what are basically blowtorches right below the cooking racks in order to make the outside of a steak nice and crispy. in short, food isn’t taken care of very well. After the grilling is done you can put it on the warming rack to stay warm. One might neglect the value of a warming rack, but it’s needed none the less. None of the grills on our list have this equipment, however, and you’ll be hard pressed to properly sear a steak on the gasoline units they do come with. Charcoal, on the other hand, can burn very hot.
By properly managing your coals and adjusting your airflow, you can get some seriously impressive temperatures out of charcoal smoker grills . You’ll have more than enough heat to produce a mallard reaction and get the edges of your steak just the way you want them.
This might seem like a major upside to charcoal. In my experience, however, it’s pretty trivial at best. Most of the time, you’ll want to cook a steak or food to just under the doneness you want over slow heat then sear it on a completely separate cooking station. This is a fancy way of saying “take it into the kitchen and throw it onto a really hot frying pan.” While you can do both steps over a charcoal using grill, you’ll have to remove the steaks, fiddle with the smoker grill to add more oxygen, and then wait for things to heat up. I much prefer simply handing off my steaks to my cooking partner indoors.
Charcoal is a lot more difficult to manage than gasoline when it comes to cooking. Gasoline grills come with easy-to-use knobs for adjusting the temperature and automatic igniters. In order to use charcoal, you’ll have to manage the flow of oxygen to your coals and measure temperature control with a grill thermometer.
This is after you’ve ignited your coals and waited for them to begin to burn evenly, of course. If you don’t already have a chimney starter or you’re not very patient when it comes to cooking surface area, gasoline grills are a clear winner when it comes to ease of use and time efficiency.
There’s certainly something to be said for actually cooking your food over an open flame. The entire experience of cooking food with charcoal proves somewhat cathartic to me.
The flavor imparted by the coals themselves is unique and somewhat different from the flavors you get from a gasoline grill. Note that I said different, not better. If you season and cook your meat properly, you’ll get excellent results from both gasoline and charcoal grills. Should you run a blind taste test, the victims of your experiment will tell you that the results taste pretty different, but they won’t reliably prefer one over the other.
The best option? Get both.
While charcoal can be a bit of a pain for cooking food, it’s great fun for more serious occasions and social events. Gasoline offers you lots of conveninece for when you’re just cooking a few burgers and don’t want to deal with the extra hassle and time that charcoal requires.
Adding Smoke To The Equation
Natural hardwood pellets smoke adds a distinctive, complex note to the food you cook on your grill. While you can toss a bit of wood pellets down on your gasoline or charcoal to add smoke naturally (or even use liquid smoke), having the best smoker grill combo enables you to emulate the results you’d get from a dedicated smoker. With wood chips, You’ll get a rich, deep smoky flavor that will take your barbecue to the next level.
If you’re serious about brisket, you want to smoke your own fish at home, or you’ve been eyeing the best smoker grill combo for a while, a model with a smoker grill combos is probably a good investment for grilling food. If you haven’t been considering one already, however, they’re not really the best impulse purchases. You’ll need to set up a good cooking area. You’ll need to buy special food safe hardwood blends to burn, which can get expensive. Just like with a stainless steel charcoal smoker grill combos, you’ll have to manage your fire temperature over a long time by controlling the digital temperature gauge of fuel and oxygen.
That said, when it comes to indirect cooking process, smokers are king. You can emulate indirect heat on your smoker grill combos by pushing all of your coals to one side or only using one set of side burner and placing your meat on the other side. Having a good side burner could ensure a well grilled meat.
Since a smoker box lives outside of the smoker grill entirely, it allows you to apply indirect heat over a much larger area. This lets you smoke a lot more meat at once. As I mentioned earlier, it also allows you to imbue your meat with the incredible flavor of natural smoke.
What Combination Grill Models Are Available on the Market?
Luckily for us, you can choose more than one of these options. By picking a combination grill, you can have the searing power of charcoal, the gradual cooking power of a smoker, and the convenience of gasoline. These packages are priced pretty affordably, too, considering that they’re literally three cooking instruments in one.
* Gas Grill, Charcoal Grill and Smoker Combinations
The Smoke Hollow 4-in-1 and Char-Griller Trio come with all three options. These units are great for households that take barbecue pretty seriously or for cooks who like to experiment. It’s also easy to clean after you’re done.
If you’ve ever wanted to find out which type of cooking surface area is best for preparing your favorite food or cut of meat, these grills will help you try all three!
* Charcoal Grill and Smoker Combinations
The Landmann Black Dog 42XT and Medina River Outdoors both feature charcoal grills with side gas smoker boxes. If you want to take a hands-on approach to cooking and use traditional heat sources, one of these units would be perfect for your backyard.
You’ll enjoy your time setting up your smoker grill in order to get rich, smoky flavors from your barbecue!
* Charcoal and Gas Grill Combinations
The Char-Griller 5050 offers side-by-side gasoline and charcoal grills. This is perfect for cooking steaks: you can warm up your smoker grill to a crazy high internal temperature while you slow-cook your steaks on the gasoline side! It also has great features as an added bonus.
When your steaks hit the doneness you want, just pop ’em on over to the stainless steel smoker grill for a few seconds to sear the edges.
This combination is also ideal for people who prefer charcoal but don’t want to deal with the hassle of working with coals every time they want a hot dog. You can use the gasoline side as a simple surface while still having the smoker grill for more serious occasions. It’s very budget friendly plus easy to clean too. This is another reason why we believe this to be one of the best smoker grill combo out there.
Natural Gas and Propane?
If you need to convert your smoker grill to use natural gasoline, the Smoke Hollow 4-in-1 Grill is your best choice.
You can convert some of the other models, too, but you’ll void the manufacturer warranty with an aftermarket kit while trying to save a few extra bucks. The Smoke Hollow offers dedicated support for both natural gasoline and propane (Check out the best propane grills under 200$).
1 Comment
Gasoline? Propane is not gasoline. Probably should fix that ASAP