Kamado-style grills in an egg-shaped ceramic shell aren’t new. Chances are, you’ve come across a Big Green Egg or a Kamado Joe before, as plenty of people use them to grill, roast, and smoke food over charcoal. What if you want to feel like a contemporary pit master and grill with those fancy modern wood pellets for fuel instead? Well, Kamado Joe’s got you covered with their new Pellet Joe.
A kamado-style pellet grill, it lets you grill, roast, and smoke your dishes using hardwood pellets, allowing you to infuse your meats and vegetables with the delicious flavor notes that only wood-fired cooking can deliver. Whether you’re a kamado fan who wants to add pellet-grilling to your arsenal or a wood-fired faithful who appreciates the design advantages of a kamado-style cooker, this thing should make a perfect addition to your outdoor cooking setup.
The Kamado Joe Pellet Joe looks, basically, like a standard ceramic egg-shaped grill and inherits all the good things that make the design very popular, from high temperatures and heat retention to high searing ability and overall efficiency. It has a thermostatically-controlled design that closely manages the amount of air going through the grill, making it easy to maintain your desired temperatures by simply adjusting the integrated control knob, which comes with specific settings for smoking (225 to 300 degrees Fahrenheit), roasting (300 to 450 degrees), and searing (600 degrees) to make the process dead easy. There’s also a thermometer in the lid, just in case you don’t trust the knob to do you right. Hey, you’ve been hurt in life… we understand.
Of course, the big selling point here is the fact that it uses wood pellets for fuel, with a hopper that can hold up to 10 pounds of pellets at a time. Yes, that’s a significantly lower amount than many pellet grills out there, although the efficiency of the ceramic construction and kamado-style combo supposedly allows it to stretch that fuel for up to 14 hours of cooking at smoking temperatures. Plus, the outfit claims they’ve significantly reduced the instance of jamming in the hopper – a common frustration with the current crop of pellet grills.
The Kamado Joe Pellet Joe has a cooking surface that measures 18 inches in diameter, so it can cook a decent amount of food in one go. We know, it’s not nearly as spacious as many pellet grills out there, but it is a common size for ceramic kamado-style cookers. It gets all the usual touches you’ll in Kamado Joe’s traditional grills, such as the domed lid with the Air Lift hinge mechanism, a stainless steel latch, aluminum work tops on the sides, a smoke tower, a bottom shelf for holding accessories, and four casters for easily moving around in the backyard. Like many modern grills, it also gets WiFi connectivity and two food probes, allowing you to monitor how your food is doing from the companion app, where you can also adjust temperature settings on the fly.
The Kamado Joe Pellet Joe is available now, priced at $1,999.99.