no grills needed AI, but you may need an AI grill. When it debuted at CES earlier this year, the BriskIt Zelos-450 was advertised as “the first grill with Generative AI.” That AI comes in the form of “Vera,” an in-app feature that “creates customized dishes based on your inputs” and then sets the grill temperature to cook them.
Photograph: Martin Szymar
The tech press reported enthusiastically about the device earlier this year. I was less optimistic, which is why it took me the better part of a year to finally free the grill from its disintegrating cardboard box – something I finally did last week. The AI is notoriously bad at recipes (unless you’re a fan of gloo pizza), and who needs a recipe for burgers or steak? Since the grill can’t physically stop cooking and pull your meat from the grates, what’s the real difference between an official AI voice telling you that your food is ready and a floating warning from the probe? And yet, the Zelos is a great buy, especially when it’s priced under $300 during a season sale. This Wi-Fi-enabled pellet grill has a great design and features that you won’t find on grills that cost twice its price or more.
I only played with the Vera AI feature for a short time, which I found useless. When I asked it to give me the recipe for “Coffee Rubbed Ribs with Tequila Sauce”, it simply added coffee to a standard rib rub recipe, and then added tequila to a standard barbecue sauce in equal proportions to ketchup. (I didn’t prepare this recipe, but it certainly appeared to have a lot of tequila.) When I used the photo-based personalized recipe recommendation tool to deliver a recipe from a photo of ground meat, dill pickles, mustard, and eggs, Vera informed me that “Image content does not relate to cooking on a wood pellet grill.” Oh. However, Grail doesn’t need AI to be a winner.
If I wanted to score a great Black Friday deal on a pellet smoker or small backyard grill, the Zelos-450 would be my choice. here’s why.
Courtesy of BriskIt
speed it up
Zelos-450 Smart Grill
It is well packed and easy to assemble. Take it from someone who tested a half-dozen grills for WIRED — a lot of grills are difficult to assemble, coming with over 100 screws and confusing instructions. I lost an entire Saturday in grill assembly, which is a big part of the reason this grill sat in the same box it came in for almost eight months. The ease of assembly was a pleasant surprise. Every part of the Zelos was clearly labeled, and the instructions were clear. It went from the box to the break-in burn in under 90 minutes, and with more diligence could have been done in under an hour.
It’s quite stylish (for a grill). Brisk It’s not putting Thane or Nomad out of business, but I challenge you to find a grill that sounds this good at this price — especially a full-featured smart grill. It has a minimalist design with clean lines and some appropriate flourishes of stainless steel trim. The pellet hopper, grease trap, and wheels all work as expected. There’s only one control knob, which does everything you need it to do.
BriskIt App via Martin Szymer
It has a powerful and effective app. Grill control apps exist on a spectrum between frustratingly glitchy and completely unusable. The Brisk It app is extremely simple, completely intuitive and has worked flawlessly every time I’ve used it. To automatically light the grill, you slide a bar to the right on the app. You’re warned to only do this while standing next to the grill, but I decided to take the extreme risk for the sake of science and lit the grill from my bed, because if I did I’d be getting up before dawn to smoke two racks of 3-2-1 ribs to be served at the kickoff of an afternoon football game. You can set the temperature for the grill and plug in the probe to receive alerts when whatever you’re cooking reaches the desired internal temperature. When it’s time to turn off the grill, you simply slide the same bar to the left and wait 20 minutes for the fire to go out. These are features that aren’t found on more expensive grills – the Masterbuilt Gravity Series 1150 we call the budget pick is actually almost quadruple the price and doesn’t have automatic ignition. You can use any brand of wood pellets in its 12-pound-capacity hopper.
There are some shortcomings also.
This grill is on the small side. As for two racks of ribs, you only have so much room. The marketing copy advertises space for 15 burgers, but I could comfortably make six burgers on it, maybe eight, but never 10. You can cook dinner for a family of four on this grill, but you won’t be able to cook a whole brisket for a party.