Summer means spending more time outdoors—and that includes cooking and dining. Smart technology, always a force in the traditional indoor kitchen, has extended its reach outdoors, adding connectivity and convenience to a variety of grilling devices, and making outdoor food prep faster, easier and safer.
Whether you’re a seasoned pit master or an aspiring outdoor chef, you’re sure to find something useful in these gadgets below.
Traeger Timberline XL
Traeger
Looking for a complete outdoor cooking setup? Look no further than the Traeger Timberline XL. Featuring an induction cooktop, 1,320 square inches of grill space and a max temperature of 500ºF, the Timberline XL ensures that you can create any culinary masterpiece you can imagine. But the Timberline’s size and strength are matched by its smarts. Not only does the grill feature an easy-to-use touchscreen display, intuitive controls and a Super Smoke mode that ensures your food retains a wood-fired flavor, but it also includes Traeger’s WiFire technology, which allows users to control and monitor their grill from across the deck or across the estate. The Timberline’s WiFire features can even be paired with Amazon Alexa or Google Home, granting the grill master voice control over the cooking process.
The Traeger Timberline XL is available for $3,799.
Traeger
Masterbuilt
Masterbuilt Digital Charcoal Smoker
Masterbuilt
If summer fare for you means smoked meats, then you may want to invest in the Digital Charcoal Smoker from Masterbuilt. The first of its kind—a marriage between digital tech and charcoal in a smoker—the Masterbuilt features four racks for a total of 1,320 square inches of cooking space and can reach 225ºF in eight minutes or 400ºF in 17 minutes, allowing users to quickly cook a substantial amount of food. And Masterbuilt owners can do it all from the palm of their hand. The Masterbuilt can connect to your preferred smart device, allowing you to control the smoker’s DigitalFan to maintain or alter temperatures, or monitor food’s readiness, via the built-in meat probe thermometers.
The Masterbuilt Digital Charcoal Smoker is $349.
MEATER Block
MEATER
If you already have a classic (read: unintelligent) grill that you love, but wouldn’t mind some smart features, check out the MEATER Block. This clever grilling gadget consists of four Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-enabled meat probes with a range of up to 165 feet that are stored in a wooden block (hence the name) alongside an easy to use touchscreen tablet that allows users to accurately monitor the internal temperatures of whatever they are cooking. Don’t want to be tied to the Block to keep tabs on your food? No problem, users can also access all the probe info from their phone or smart device of choice. Better still, MEATER offers a Guided Cook System that offers step-by-step instructions, complete with alerts to perfectly prepare your food, and an Advanced Estimator Algorithm to help you determine how long to cook and rest your meat.
The MEATER Block is available for $299.
MEATER
Grillbot
Grillbot
Grillbot
Grilling isn’t all glamor, good food and great friends—someone still has to clean up when it’s done. Or rather, they had to, because thanks to the Grillbot, the most tedious and thankless task of any grill master is a thing of the past. The intelligent little automaton is like a Roomba for your grill—a bristle-wielding, disc-shaped device that traverses the surface of your grill at the push of a button, scraping away all remnants of the last meal you prepared.
The Grillbot is available for $119 .