How to Choose your Wood-pellet Barbecue?
Wood-pellet barbecues represent what the most demanding gourmets expect from precise and tasty cooking, with the flavor of a wood fire. Invented in the United States at the end of the 1970s, this type of barbecue is gradually gaining ground over the charcoal barbecue. The advantages of pellets and the way this equipment works leave behind all other methods when you try it. But, once you are convinced with this product, how to choose among the various product models according to their size, their cooking capacity, their options and their ease of use?
Advantages of the wood-pellet barbecue
The wood-pellet barbecue uses technology that provides direct or indirect heat, with the advantages of charcoal for flavor and aroma, without its disadvantages.
Health Benefits
Thus, when the traditional charcoal barbecue generates toxic fumes or when it chars the food without actually cooking it, the pellet grill cooks perfectly and healthily. The wood pellets do not come into contact with food and no dangerous smoke escapes.
Benefits for cooking
The wood-pellet barbecue, in addition to lighting quickly, offers uniform and tasty cooking which once again differentiates it from charcoal. It therefore guarantees stable maintenance of the desired heat level by the internal fire management system. With the heat generated by the combustion of wood pellets, it becomes possible to precisely control the degrees to adapt each temperature to the food and thus respect the beautiful pieces of meat, fish or even the most delicate vegetables. This type of equipment is perfect to respect the principle of “low and slow”, dear to connoisseurs of cooking with wood pellets, a cooking method almost impossible to obtain with charcoal.
The taste of wood fire
The wood-pellet barbecue offers amateurs the real taste of a wood fire without the inconvenience of charcoal, but with the same ease of use as a gas barbecue. In addition, it allows you to choose between different types of wood for ever more refined flavors. Have you ever tasted a prime beef rib that has been slowly cooked and delicately impregnated with a full-bodied taste of oak or vine shoots? Or a slightly fruity roast chicken flavored with cherry wood? This is what the wood-pellet barbecue offers.
Versatility
A real outdoor kitchen! The wood-pellet barbecue is a versatile piece of equipment: it roasts, smokes, grills, braises or slow-cooks, it’s the king’s choice! This advantage makes it one of the essentials of the summer when you want to bring together family and friends in your garden or in your country house.
How does a wood-pellet barbecue work?
Pellet barbecues work on the principle of a fuel, in this case wood pellets, and an adjustable heat flow.
- First, you just have to fill the tank, called the hopper, with wood pellets.
- The pellets then enter the system through a cooking chamber fitted with an auger. For this, electric current is necessary.
- The cooking chamber causes the combustion of the pellets.
- The barbecue automatically adjusts the quantity of pellets to reach the desired temperature.
- Fans, called intake fans, draw the heat into the cooking zone.
What size should I choose for my wood-pellet barbecue?
The size of your barbecue should be studied according to your consumption habits and whether or not you are used to having a lot of guests at home. Larger equipment is therefore suitable for people who organize barbecues very regularly or who need different cooking surfaces for different types of food. In any case, when you buy a beautiful object such as a designer pellet barbecue, the requirement is to maintain an intense cooking pace!
The cooking surface
Like all barbecues, wood-pellet barbecues come in different sizes depending on the desired cooking surface.
You need at least 200 to 250 cm² per guest to make sure you satisfy all appetites:
- For 4 to 6 people, it is necessary to count on a minimum of 1500 cm²
- For 6 to 8 people, count between 2000 and 2500 cm²
- For more than 8 people, at least 2500 to 3000 cm² are necessary
Note that there is a wood-pellet barbecue whose surfaces are twice as large because it combines both a grill and a plancha.
Hopper capacity
Unlike the gas barbecue for example, which depends on a number of burners, the pellet barbecue is based on the size of the hopper allowing more or less pellets to be placed inside the barbecue. This allows you to benefit from a more or less long heating time depending on the number of guests and their appetite.
Larger hopper capacities can hold up to an entire bag or box of pellets, typically 7kg. This corresponds to a whole day of barbecue for up to 6 people!
The various other options to choose from
Cooking with a barbecue is not limited to browning a piece of meat on one side and then the other. Especially with a pellet barbecue, even more so when it offers many options far from being accessories. You must therefore choose your equipment according to your needs and your desire to venture into the field of barbecue cooking!
In addition to the grill, the barbecue must or must not contain:
- A temperature sensor: this equipment is essential for perfectly monitoring what you’re cooking. For even more precision, choose a barbecue equipped with cooking probe thermometers that directly control the core temperature of your food to the nearest degree.
- The range of temperatures is also an important selection criterion: you need a temperature low enough for smoking (around 80°C-100°C), but high enough for grilling (ideally up to 300 °C-350°C).
- A LED-powered reading system: to easily follow the progress of grilling, at any time, in any weather, without having to open your barbecue.
- Wifi / bluetooth connection: to follow your cooking in real time from your smartphone. Certain connected barbecue mobile applications even offer a programming system so that you no longer have to be dependent and “stuck” in front of the barbecue while the guests are starting to eat or are waiting for you to toast.
Design as an additional selection criterion
The barbecues offer different designs depending on the brands and ranges. Knowing the budget that this represents, you might want to choose an equipment that is pleasant to look at, or even one that stands out. The cherry on the cake is to be able to customize the colors and finish of the materials of your barbecue when ordering.
What about cleaning a wood-pellet barbecue?
Anyone who has had to clean a barbecue knows how tedious the chore is. Between the cooked and annealed fats and all that aggregates there… we end up doing nothing, then regretting it the following weekend.
Fortunately, unlike the charcoal barbecue and even the gas barbecue, the pellet barbecue promotes faster cleaning, with fats that stick less to the interior walls because they are not charred. But it depends on the type of barbecue you choose. The most traditional equipments leave it up to you to clean everything every time you use it. But between baking soda and elbow grease, it’s nothing to cheer about.
On the contrary, the most sophisticated wood-pellet barbecues provide you with automatic maintenance, which gives you time to breathe and enjoy your guests.
A hybrid wood-pellet barbecue with all the options
The only French barbecue on the market to combine ease of use and flavour, the Montvel barbecue also brings you everything you dream of for successful and healthy barbecues.
The Montvel wood-pellet barbecue, 100% made in France, brings you on a plate the necessary options to enjoy delicious cooking that truly elevates the barbecue to a high level of quality and aesthetics.
More than a wood-pellet barbecue, it doubles as a plancha. With its double lower grid, its additional higher grid and the plancha, you benefit from a cooking surface of 5000 cm², well beyond the standards for ten guests. You thus have the possibility of cooking all the food you want at the same time or at any time, by choosing the appropriate cooking mode.
You can also enjoy a unique design inspired by traditional kitchen “pianos”, which color you can choose from the configurator when ordering. In this way, your barbecue will be completely personalized.
The Montvel barbecue thus combines:
- The quality of materials and 100% French manufacturing
- Entire customization of colors and finishes
- The best of technology and programming thanks to its LED screen, its connection and its mobile application
- Complete cooking control thanks to a double integrated temperature probe
- Large hopper capacity for pellets
- Healthy cooking thanks to pellet and plancha technology, without toxic smoke emissions
- Ecology with the use of 100% wood pellets, without additives, from PEFC-certified forests, and with different varieties that allow more culinary creativity
- An exceptional total cooking surface to cook several types of food at the same time
More than a pellet barbecue, the Montvel barbecue combines excellence with all the options available on the market to provide connoisseurs with an entirely new experience dedicated to the fine art of living “à la française”.
