This Smart Electric Grill Can’t Replace a Barbecue
Testing smart grills has sparked a philosophical debate about what constitutes a “barbecue”: Should all barbecues involve real fire (or just heat, like infrared)? Is everyone at the barbecue expected to also smoke? In the end, it was one specific question that clarified these issues for me. The current Model G Dual Zone Smart Grill is definitely not a barbecue. Although it’s designed for outdoor use, requires outdoor space, and leaves grill marks on your food, this electric grill is just that, a grill. Simply put, it was like taking a giant George Foreman grill out onto the patio.
While I appreciated the connectivity and size of the grilling area, I didn’t like the flimsy physical design. While the grill did get very hot and was very efficient at cooking food, it took longer than a gas grill and about the same time as a charcoal grill. And cleaning was a chore, despite the self-cleaning feature. Ultimately, it just wasn’t worth paying $999.99 to stand on a patio to get the same effect on your food as standing over a stove, so even if you’re prohibited from using gas, charcoal, or real fire when patio, I’ll probably choose a different electric grill.
It has a modern design, but flimsy assembly.
If you haven’t purchased a barbecue or grill in a while, the first thing you need to know is that all grills are shipped to you unassembled and take hours to assemble. Current took me two hours to create and required an app to provide directions, which isn’t as useful as a printed guide when you’re outside in the sun and squinting to see the details of a video on your phone. However, the directions were clear and the parts were well labeled. However, some parts of the grill were inexplicably fragile, while others, such as the BBQ tools (tongs, spatula), were redesigned to be more durable than any BBQ tools I’ve ever used before and came with replaceable rubber handles.
The metal grille is held together with screws in most places, as well as metal clips, which turned out to be useless. In particular, the side panels that make up the cabinet underneath the grille refused to hold up. Once you insert the panel, the slightest breeze will cause it to slide off again. Great care was taken to create a durable, reversible food storage area in the cabinet, which I really liked. However, the entire grill is exceptionally light, and even when fully assembled it didn’t feel durable – in fact, simply rolling the grill ten feet from where I assembled caused such vibration that the grill lost all of its panels from -at one time he was in a new place.
The grill features a large digital touch screen that displays the temperature on both sides of the grill. It has 330 inches of cooking space, which was more than any grill I’ve tried, and the whole point of the dual zone is that you can use just one side of the grill or use both sides at different temperatures. The top half of the grill also has a warming grate and two temperature sensors to monitor food quality. The grill has enough ports for two additional probes.
Other electric grills worth considering:
-
Char-Broil® Patio Bistro® TRU-Infrared Electric Grill, $199.97.
-
Weber Pulse 2000 Electric Grill with Cart , $1,068.98
Difficulty connecting to the app
The Current Grill app is fairly simple, with tabs for recipes and videos on how to use the grill. In the process of testing review products, I probably plug between five and ten new products into my phone a week, and I can’t remember ever having as much trouble with it as I do with the Current Grill. Apparently I’m not alone: when you call customer support (who even answered the phone on Sunday), Bluetooth and Wi-Fi problems are third on the phone’s menu.
After a day of troubleshooting, I was finally able to connect the app, but luckily the grill doesn’t require the app to work. You can simply turn it on from the touch screen. The benefits of the app were limited compared to other smart grills. You can’t turn on grills remotely—that’s a security issue—but other grills offer many more features even when the grill is off. Current won’t let you access any information unless the grill is on, and when it’s on and connected, you’re limited to simply viewing and setting the temperature of the grill and the temperature of any connected sensors. While the recipe section isn’t endless, it includes enough recipes for any main dish you grill.
Heats up slowly and has high electrical consumption.
The whole point of this venture is to grill food, and in that sense, Current does a great job. Temperatures on both sides of the grill can reach up to 700°F, which sounds exciting since most electric grills can’t achieve that. But even with the lid closed, it took almost 20 minutes. Since it’s electric and you don’t get the smoke or charring effect, you can just turn on the stove – it will take less time to heat up the pan on the stove.
This leads to another problem with the Current: it loses a significant amount of heat when the lid is open. As I grilled steak, chicken, corn, salmon, cauliflower, and pork tenderloin, I saw the same thing over and over again. If the grill is very hot, you can get a good initial sear if you close the top of the grill right away, but if the lid has been closed, the grill will take a long time to adjust to the lower temperature for cooking. items through. However, you could get around this problem by simply leaving the grill lid open for a minute, because the heat loss was so significant that you really couldn’t cook much with the grill lid open. Since the lid is made of solid metal, this meant that you couldn’t see what was happening on the surface of the grill unless you opened it, at which point the temperature would drop 150 degrees. At the same time, the electrical load that the grill uses is not minimal and amounts to 1750 W. Current recommends using a dedicated circuit, which I didn’t have on my patio, and if you don’t have one either, expect to have to flip a few circuit breakers in the process.
Smart BBQs (non-electric) worth considering:
Frustrating self-cleaning
Cleaning any grill is a chore, so I was very pleased with the Current’s thirty-minute self-cleaning feature. At the end of each grilling session, despite pre-seasoning the grill and using plenty of oil, there will be a lot of caked-on debris left on the grill plates, but that’s true of any grill. Cleaning with brushes that have worked on other grills didn’t do much for the Current, since the cooktop isn’t an open grill, but a series of wavy metal plates. Unfortunately, the self-cleaning feature seemed to have the opposite effect that you wanted. The grill looked worse after self-cleaning, no matter how many times I ran it (see above). Removing the grill plates completely and cleaning the insides was the only way to really clean them.
Bottom line: there are better options
I’m guessing someone buys an electric grill so they don’t have to deal with charcoal or open flames. The food I cooked with Current certainly turned out good, and while it lacked the smoke and char that a flame provides, the food otherwise compared well to its BBQ counterparts, but it was also clear to me that the whole point of BBQing was in the effect fire and smoke have on food. However, even at the much lower price, I would have problems with the Current’s design, which I fear would not withstand a major hurricane after a long and complex build.
The connection did not provide enough functionality to overcome connection difficulties. Ultimately, you’re spending almost $1,000 cooking on a patio with less efficiency than on a stove, but with the same effect. If you had to go electric, I’d go with a much less expensive grill and might be willing to sacrifice the size of the active cooking space to get more consistent heat.