Which BBQ to Buy? Kamado Joe vs Weber Kettle head to head! Kamado Joe Jr. vs. Weber Master-Touch

hey I'm James I'm smoking dad barbecue and today we're doing another type to head video so lined up for you today we're doing Kamado joe versus the weber kettle alright before you tell me you can't compare a kettle to a Kamat oh there's a few good reasons why I actually think this comparison should exist one I often hear people referring to kettle they're going out for their first grill or a starter grill which is great I think you should be looking at doing something other than cooking on propane there's so much more flavor with charcoal cooking I think that's where we can all get along and say you should be cooking on charcoal the interesting story about this kettle is it actually belongs to my neighbor and we had this conversation a couple years ago should he get a Kamat oh she got a starter grill and he chose to get a kettle and just this week I helped him set up his brand-new kimono Joe classic 3 and so following his progression and cooking to where he realized he needed more than what the kettle could provide I thought I'd do a quick video sharing his evolution and cooking in terms of three things the kettle's great at and three things the Kamado joe is great at and if maybe that helps one of you pick a grill that gets you away from propane mission accomplished we've got a lot to uncover in today's video so before I forget please hit that like and subscribe button to catch future videos let's get into it alright this video isn't actually as crazy as it sounds so let me explain why this is a kettle master touch model from Weber and out the door with some accessories if you added the slow and sea air cover to make sure it doesn't rust aggro gripper and things that you need to get cooking the same things that come with a kimono Joe where you get a heat deflector for indirect cooking a grill gripper to lift your your grid a dash tool to pull out the ash out the door with those accessories added this grill in Canadian dollars I know you're gonna laugh and say what's that monopoly money no it's what we use it's our actual currency but this is $539 when i priced it out this morning and that Joe jr. beside me is $499 so price-wise these two are actually in a far more similar space for someone looking to get that starter grill so with price out of the way let's go into a little bit of the difference there's a lot of them and find out which of these two you should be looking at for your first charcoal grill all right I would like to cover three things in this video first I'm gonna tell you three reasons that you should buy a kettle I'm going to tell you three reasons you should buy a Kamata Joe second thing we want to cover it's just a quick overview of each grill how do they work what makes them unique how do you set them up and actually use one if that's the grill that you're looking at getting and third I'd like to do a little bit of a test to check on the differences in the approach to how each cooker approaches indirect or direct really so those are the three things you're in for today let's start with the top three reasons you should consider buying a weber kettle alright so reason number one you should buy a weber kettle is its portability this thing is so easy to move around one-handed pick that up bring it along anywhere you want to go this is much easier to take with you and so if you're moving your grill around your yard regularly this is definitely a girl that you want to consider it's light it's got the wheels built in it's just easy to move around number two if you are moving your grill around often you want to make sure that you don't damage it in the process and so while I absolutely love taking Mike model Joe jr. with me one of the highlights of having these girls is the ability to take new places without a doubt you know this is lighter and I'm not as worried about it breaking these are not ceramic components they're metal and I don't want to be rough with them and bang them and dent them because you can get an air leak and mess up your indirect cooking and airflow on it but definitely there's some durability there with metal versus ceramics so is the first two reasons the third reason you might want to buy a kettle is price already mentioned the review we're gonna do today is shockingly closer in price than you might have guessed it was at the beginning of this video but that's overlooking the point that this is a much larger grid size than what you get on the Jo's jr. and you're more likely for that much real estate needing to compare it to something like the classic or the Big Joe whoever kettles come in all sorts of different sizes but for the price for the money you definitely get a lot of real estate so one of the three reasons why I think you should consider a kettle now let me go to three reasons why I think a Kamado is the right girl for you and perhaps some of the same reasons why my neighbor a few years in is selling this one and setting up one of these so on to our three reasons why you should buy a quemado first reason is the versatility these cookers can do so many things right out of the gate from low and slow cooks like ribs or brisket pulled pork to hot and fast cooks we do pizza on here at 900 degrees and it comes out of amazing or when we're searing our steaks my favorite way to cook a steak is reverse sear so I like to smoke it with just a little bit of wood and then once we hit our internal temperature crank the heat and get the temperature up I'm often seeing eight nine hundred degrees in a matter of minutes and that's just not a temperature that these kettles can reach so in point number two on why you should buy a quemado Joe grill so I cook year-round and one of the things that I love about a ceramic cooker is how energy efficient it is it uses so little charcoal and confirmed for a long long time it holds heat really well and if you've seen any of my other videos right before poor cooks I set up the joke don't even check it overnight don't need to worry about it I'll put a link in the description if you're interested in how to set up your kimono Joe for the same hassle-free low and slow operation but it's so energy efficient that we can do that you can set it up go to bed 12 hours later 18 hours later 24 hours later I still have charcoal left in the basket depending on the temperature that I'm cooking in and in winter in particular using a lot less coal you cannot keep a kettle fueled without adding charcoal or that long on to point number three so our third and final reason or third out of the three I'm picking today there are many more but the third reason I wanted to highlight why you should pick a Kamado doe is the moisture retention and so one of the things that just makes cooking on the style of grills so rewarding is how much moisture they retain and the difference with you know a gas grill and a coatl Jo or ceramic cooker or even a kettle like the Weber here in front of me is the difference in how much moisture gets retained so when you're cooking with propane you have not an airtight grill so you have lots of heat in that grill and that heat is racing towards the cool air and it's depriving and taking your wheats moisture with it so that's most noticeable when you cook things like chicken have you ever had barbecue chicken and thought this is dry I promise it doesn't have to be that way you can have such a thing as good juicy chicken and it's fully cooked so moisture retention is a big big big advantage for ceramic cookers and that is also going to be an advantage when comparing it to a kettle is this is not airtight there's still lots of places where hair is getting in and out I still prefer charcoal any day over propane but for meats that dry out easily like a brisket or chicken or turkey you haven't tasted them until you've tried them off of a coatl Joe so those are the three reasons the think you're looking for a grill how do they get go you should consider either a kettle or a kimono Joe now let me show you a quick overview of each one if they're new to you both on how they work how you set them up and then we'll get into our tests okay so things start off pretty similar we have a bottom draft door which is where our air comes in and we have a top vent where our air comes out I like to think of these as a gas pedal and a brake pedal so the gas pedal you want to go faster you want to cook hotter you need more air and I would adjust that on the bottom you want to slow things down and start holding a steady temperature that's your brake pedal up to the point where you could even maybe even stop the car and that's completely closing your top vent in this regard the kettle and the kimono Joe function very much the same way two different ways of how they set that up and I'll show you inside each so you can see what that looks like but getting started we have our adjustment dial out down here that will open and close for a more-or-less airflow and I'll do that when you can actually see what that does and then we've got our top then now in terms of difference in style this is the upgraded Weber model which comes with this nice rubber which is great because these things get really hot and if you're doing a chicken or something like that where you're three four hundred degrees you're gonna need some high heat gloves in order to be a touch of this this still gets quite hot even with the rubber but at least makes it more manageable the other thing you'll notice here is just the difference in designs this gets gummed up quite easily and it gets a little bit sticky but with some degreaser and regular use it's not a problem you can keep on moving that all right let me show you how the fire controls on the come Bato Joe work if you haven't seen this before so very similar to what I just covered you've got a draft door on the bottom which is your air and we've got our analogy here the brake pedal on the top we want no brakes that's wide open and that's max airflow to some temperature control here with the Daisy wheel if you have one of the new or series 3 grills they know they no longer come with a daisy wheel cap they come with a control tower cap which works very similarly to moving left or right for more or less air and it can open up all the way for max airflow and really get that fire going so now that we know how to control the air on both Tucker's let's take a look inside and just look for any differences between the two ok so let's take a look inside I like the kimono Jo which has a hinge that stays attached the dome is completely removable on the kettle and on the master touch model you get that hanger on the back which gives you a place to store that pot don't sew inside as you can see we have our humane cooking grid are raised cooking grid underneath all of those our charcoal brick which is what we would for our charcoal on and we've got a couple options for doing that one we could just dump some charcoal in there and get cook on - we've got two little charcoal baskets that we can arrange a couple of different ways to put them together I have a centerfire or some indirect area around the outside and go for a bit of a vortex or we can actually push those to each side and light them independently and have an indirect area in the middle and I'm hoping the cameras picking this up but you can see the air controls and we have this rotating fan type mechanism probably the best way to describe you have seen it but they slide around on me adjust how much airflow we get in the grills let me show you what that looks like you can see we have them all the way closed all the way open so for lighting it I'm gonna leave it open and we'll get ready to do our test but in a second or before I do that pardon me let me show you inside the Joe jr. alright let's take a look inside the craw Joe jr. so naturally on top we have our cooking grate which like the Weber has one of these hinge lift assemblies if we were cooking direct and we wanted to throw on some smoking wood we could do that easily let's go ahead and pull this off this is really right here this next layer the biggest difference between the two cookers is that you are getting a true indirect cooking area albeit the cooking area on the weber is much much larger but this is absolutely big enough to do a spatchcock chicken plenty of steaks it's really only if you got into a whole bunch of burgers and dogs but this isn't gonna have the real estate that you need and you'd want either the Joe classic or Big Joe in order to compete with the real estate that you get on a kettle but I just love this setup for getting great indirect convection cooking if you haven't seen it before divide it in place let me slide that out trying to juggle things without dropping it and this is the rack system that just sits on these notches just like that hoping that you can see that as I can't see the camera and at the bottom is our charcoal basket and now this is not included on the Joe jr. it is included on the newer series three grills and I fell in love with it there so I had to go and find one myself for the Joe jr. and a company called cash basket makes this one ordered it online got it within a week or so and I absolutely loved having it for the Joe Jr as well and the reason I like that is when you're done your cook you just shake out your ash all your discarded ash falls to the bottom it's really easy to clean it out you put this back in and you are in business the other reason I really like this for the Joe jr. is this is a grill I like to take with me places and one of the advantages that I cited earlier is that ceramic keeps its heat really well one of the disadvantages when you're out for the day and you want to throw this back in your vehicle is that ceramic keeps its heat really well and it doesn't want to cool off so to get it to cool off much more quickly when we're done a cook using metal hooks we just take the charcoal basket out and dose that with some water and then we can leave this wide open and it cools off much much quicker and it just makes it that much more usable for taking camping or a picnic or to the beach or something like that so enough about the inside of each Grylls let's get onto our test all right welcome to our test segment we get to put these two grills head-to-head if you've seen any of my other head-to-head videos before like where I compared the Komodo Joe classic to the large big green egg or the kimono Joe jr. to my minimax big green egg I'll put a link to the description if you haven't had a chance to check them out but in short what we did is we used a really simple test just to illustrate the difference in how each setup works from an indirect performance and I used a piece of bread something simple to show the practical differences and how that manifests itself out during an indirect cook well I wasn't gonna do that again today because we've already done it I was going to do a spatchcock chicken on each bird but as this is a beautiful Saturday mid self-isolation in the Kovach crisis groceries are hard to come by as is fresh check-in so I wasn't able to source either these things safely for this video so we're sticking with toast and what I'm going to do is put a piece of toast in the middle and just show the differences in in direct and indirect and why I wish that I could have shown you the chicken video is this would have really Illustrated the advantage of ceramic where it holds that heat and you cook your bird not just from the bottom but also from the top down and it crisps off that skin almost as that they have been deep-fried so if you've been following me on Instagram and spoken to a barbecue you've maybe seen some pictures there that just look delicious they taste even better than they look you just have to take my word for it on the taste so today we're gonna do a visual representation of how these two grills chol indirect cooking so that's what we got in store for you let me know in the comments what you think if you'd like to see a different type of comparison between these grills other grills or if you have some questions I'm always looking through my comments and try and answer those questions so let me know what's on your mind well I get to work firing these up are you fired up I'm fired up let's do it all right let me show you what we got going on over here I've set up the kettle the most popular way for indirect cooking by using the side-to-side charcoal dividers so we've got our two little dividers going and then the Joe jr. we've lit our fire and we will go ahead and add our indirect heat diffuser in a moment links a few of those poles that are left so let me take the camera back to the tripod and we'll give these girls a chance to come up to temperature the temperature we're going to simulate today is 400 degrees which I would do for the stock car chick and the virtual chickens that we wanted to cook for today that would be that would be the temp that I would go to 425 so let's give these a moment to come up to 10 all right so if you saw my other review videos you know we're gonna hit these up with some bread we did a baguette test on the large big green egg versus the Komodo Joe we did toast on the minimax in the Joey jr. to illustrate the difference that extra height makes between the diffuser and your cooking grid today we're going with a bagel because that's what I had so let's get these on the grill we're gonna go about five minutes I'm gonna put it facedown and we'll just see what it looks like for toast so the kettle is set up for indirect is indirect as we can get it from the factory which is our fire on each side with an indirect area in the middle and so I think there should be pretty good because there's not rekt heat coming up it's coming up and around whereas our Joe jr. has the heat coming up hitting that deflector plate and coming up and round so I think that's about as fair as we can make it let's find out how the different indirect setups work alright so quick update I mentioned I'm just gonna bring you closer show you the temperatures I went inside to grab a coat the next thing you know the skies opened up for a bit so I went inside took shelter came back out now that the rain is stopped solely about twenty thirty minutes but I want to pass this on for an important reason when I came back out our kettle was no longer 400 degrees it was down to 350 I opened it up and we burned through nearly all of our charcoal that I've used to get our temperature in the first place so we're waiting in holding to get back up to temperature I've added the rest of the charcoal I had in the bag to try and get back up there or Joe jr. householder shot a little bit so I'm just actually slowing that down it's about 425 450 and there is I checked so lots of cool in there so two different sized cookers not an exact comparison but just again that ceramic efficiency really showing through there whereas even just getting close to this right about there like a fireplace you feel that radiant heat escaping after the rainstorm to get lit and come up temperature again and then we'll be ready to do our bagel test so see in a second and show you both are at 400 okay we have finally got go with our grills back to the exact same temperature 400 degrees where we started let me bring you a little closer okay so her mom Joey jr. sitting right at about 400 and our kettle looks almost at 400 so I think that is as fair as we're going to get let's do it okay it's only been a couple minutes and I don't know if you can hear or see but the rain has returned but might cut our cast a little bit short but if my notice is any indication one of these two is already toasting quite a posting that's a word for this fast rate we're gonna find out if one of these is already ahead of the other so I think we put on the kettle first let's check that out looks pretty good from the top oh that's what I smell that's a little bit it's well done let's find out or junior see some huh yeah okay let me get another set of gloves so I can hold both those and we'll do our conclusions all right I got gloves on now that we can handle this and as you can tell just you night and day difference between the two indirect setups what we wanted to see is the difference in indirect cooking in terms of what does that mean what does that how's the bottom of your chicken gonna look indirect at a high temperature versus when you have some heat protection so before I get completely soaked again results just night and day difference sorry for the weather not cooperating that we couldn't do everything that we wanted to do hope you enjoyed today's comparison if there's another comparison you'd like to see me do let me know in the comments below but I'm gonna go ahead and call this one before I'm wet head-to-toe night day difference the winner and this one round c'mon Oh Joe no doubts about it see you guys next time if you haven't already please hit that like and subscribe button I'm James from soaking to a BBQ we'll see you then you

Channel: Smoking Dad BBQ

Views: 126,768

Keywords: which bbq to buy, which weber to buy, which bbq smoker to buy, whats the best charcoal bbq, which kamado joe to buy, kamado joe jr., Weber vs Kamado Joe, which ceramic bbq to buy, weber vs big green egg, Weber Kettle Master-Touch, bbq review, bbq comparision, Kamado Joe, first bbq, what bbq should I buy, should i buy a charcoal grill, bbq head to head, bbq head 2 head, bbq smoker, indirect cooking, low and slow

Id: EB8kzRRVk_s

Length: 24min 11sec (1451 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020