Yoder YS640s Pellet Grill Review - Thoughts and Tips

what's up everybody welcome back to patio today on the channel we're doing something a little different today we're talking about the yoder ys640s i've had this pellet grill for 14 months i figured it was a good time to do kind of a one-year review i'm not going to do a traditional review we're gonna do a little differently today's magic number is five i'm going to talk about five different areas and give you five tips on each area the five areas we're going to talk about are what i like about it things that concern people about a pellet grill and yoder five maintenance tips five things that you should have for it and five tips for yoder so we're going to cover the whole spectrum all right so let's talk about the five things that i like about this first first would be just it's built like a tank this thing weighs 330 pounds i think it's made out of cast i'm not sure what it's made out of like i said i'm an i.t guy but it's a really thick heavy metal um you know the lid requires a counterbalance and you know why is that important well it holds heat yes it takes a little bit longer to get heat soaked um but when you're cooking the cooler months it retains heat a lot better you can still get a thermal jacket for it if you want all the pellet grills kind of offer that on the thinner ones you need that in the northeast in the winter here i have not really had a problem last year was a little bit milder winter so i'm not going to say you don't need it but it does hold heat very very well and i do like that about it the second thing that i really like about it and really was why i went with yoder that's the removable diffuser plate all right so this thing removes there's a diffuser plate here think of it like a convection oven almost we've got a firebox we've got a big diffuser plate there all the grease strips down to the side and the heat kind of rolls around when you remove this guy you can sear directly over the fire so now all of a sudden you get yourself some grill grates and you can see your steaks just as good as any other grill out there so that's very important to me the other thing i like about it is just ease of use so sometimes you come home and it's been a long day and you don't want to mess with the barbecue um so what you do with this is you know if i'm let's say i'm doing some boneless grilled chicken or whatever i can come turn this on set it a 450 go inside prep my chicken have a drink wait 20 30 minutes throw my chicken on go back inside come out 10 minutes later flip it and then come back out again maybe 12 or 13 minutes depending on how thick the chicken breasts are and i've got a little bit of grill marks on it but i've got no burnt i don't have to sit here and worry about fire um and you know i'm going to get a great tasting meal without all the hassle of having to babysit the meal and sometimes you just don't want to do that another thing i like about it is the fact that you can use many different pellets right you got mesquite you got apple you got cherry you got hickory you got oak you can get some jack daniels ones there's i think elder there's pecan i mean there's so many different types so you can change your pellets to suit whatever you're cooking or if you just want to experiment but even more so you can blend these together lots of my videos i've done where i blended hickory and cherry together or mesquite and cherry and you just kind of blend it together and away you go the fifth thing i like about this is that the range of use this goes all the way from 180 fahrenheit up to 600. you can cook a lot of different things on there you can do some smoking if you want to even take it a step further you turn this guy on i don't know if you can hear it but a fan comes on right what we've got is normally that fan rotate or circulates all the heat or and the smoke but when there's nothing burning and i if i don't hit the start button that fan will run so now i can get one of those amazing smoke tubes i've used it in a few videos but i can light that with a torch get some smoke going and now i can cold smoke so versatility of of this guy and most pellet grills most of them don't have the fan that comes on like this one does though but there's a lot of different things you can cook you know you want to smoke some salt some cheese some bacon whatever you want to do you can do that and then you go all the way up to searing so you know that's a great thing in my book so let's talk about five things that concern people about yoder and just a pellet grill in general um you know the way a pellet grill works is you've got pellets here it goes into an auger goes into a firebox and as those pellets burn they generate an ash and what happens is you've got to take a shop vac and you've got to clean out your pellet grill just comes with owning one i've done a video on how to clean it you can take this thing apart and clean it in 10 minutes it's very very easy but you know that's always a concern for people who aren't familiar with one and sometimes they just don't want to deal with some of the maintenance now for the firebox in general you really need to clean it every cook or two because if you don't you're going to run the risk of not getting a clean fire and maybe it not starting properly so you know that is one thing cleaning the entire thing you don't have to take it apart to do all that you don't have to vacuum it every other time i mean for me i might do it once a month every six weeks but here's the difference here here's the firebox uh place where all the pellets go they come down from the auger they come down from the auger here and they go in here and then your firebox because i've got the diffuser with the removable plate i just remove that i pick this out i dump them into the bottom of the box [Music] and then i i don't worry about it right all i got to do is make sure i've got a clean firebox every time i don't have to worry about the rest to grill as the you know the grill gets full then i get a shot back and i take care of when i clean it out one of the other things that people worry about specifically with yoder is rust right so these guys i wish i knew what they're made of i should probably know i think it's cast but what happens is you get some rust spots now this guy's covered all the time um pellet grills don't like moisture so you should always have one covered but i've got some rust spots here i've got some at the back i might definitely i know i've got some across the bottom here you can see a little bit of a rust there mainly from food dripping down there and a little bit around the chimney i don't really have a ton yet a couple here so you get some rust spots but when you buy one of these grills they ship with yoder paint and you can watch a couple videos on it i haven't done it yet like i said it's 14 months old i haven't seen the need for it yet but really it's a matter of sanding this thing down it's matte black paint so you can stay in a section and paint a section and it's really just going to blend in it's really not that much of work from my experience i think this is probably in every two or three year thing we'll find out after another winter of cooking in spring but you know i always do a very deep cleaning on my grills in the spring anyhow so if i've got to do that it's not really a concern for me like i said i watched some videos of it before i bought it i am not a handy guy right i work on computers i get paid to move a mouse and uh you know i am not one of those guys that's up hanging shelves and doing all that i usually pay someone to do all that um but i looked at this one like this is really not that big a deal so if that's a viewer on your mind watch some videos of it and just kind of make a decision for yourself another thing that people worry about is just the overall cost of operations right like you've got a bunch of pellets this thing holds 20 of these pellets um you buy these by a 20 pound bag and if you look at that cost when you're at smoking temperatures you're going to roughly go through maybe a a pound an hour so smoking temperatures aren't too bad you get this thing up to four or five six hundred degrees you're going through some pellets and a lot of people worry about the cost associated with that my advice to you is just find a place that ships a pallet to you or half a pallet it's significantly cheaper i did some research and i i used the barbecue delight pellets right from the get-go i bought this from bbq.com and they actually shipped pellets so that's where i get all my pellets from i think i didn't haven't done the math recently but it's probably 10 or dollars maybe twelve dollars a bag if you buy a half pallet so it's really not too bad at that point one of the other things people worry about just the overall flavor of the food like is it really smoky is it you know does it have a strong wood flavor and i would say no i recently did a steak battle video where i did my natural gas versus this and we had a steak and i cooked them very similar i was actually shocked at the difference in the taste of meat even my wife said this one won hands down i just i never did them side by side it's just whatever i feel like cooking with this has a great flavor to it it's not a really smoke smoky like some people complain about a pellet grill that doesn't have the intense smoke that some of the other smokers out there have and it doesn't it does have a smoky flavor like you can make pulled pork briskets no problem right and if you know anything about competition they don't want a really heavy smoke on anyhow um but it's got a great flavor to it i i would say that i've never given food to anyone here uh that's come over whatever that hasn't enjoyed the flavor of food it's it's definitely i i wouldn't even worry about that it's going to be good the last one is really we already talked about kenneth seer most people want to be able to see her right if they're cooking burgers they're doing steaks chicken pork chops whatever if you have a grill you want to be able to sear and i think that that's a common concern that people have and yogurt's got you covered so let's talk maintenance tips real quick i did a full cleaning video as i mentioned earlier but in this i just want to cover real quick get yourself a couple cleaners you want zap 505 this stuff is amazing this will work on any grill it's a great degreaser honestly the best i've ever seen you can get it on amazon or home depot get yourself some sheila's shine especially if you have the stainless steel shelves because it puts a nice protective oil on it get yourself some buckets these uh these are actually made by tregor you can get them from anyone who uh deals in pellet grills and has trigger i don't think yoder specifically makes one but in the bottom right hand side of this there's a collection bucket and the oil kind of moves down and that bucket fills up and if you have one of these you can just throw this out you don't have to worry about cleaning your bucket i mentioned there's a diffuser in here get some aluminum foil and cover that every time and that way what happens is that when you're doing you know a barbecue sauce or a whole fatty meat or anything like that it'll just drip on the aluminum foil when it cools down you can crumple that up and throw it out and it just makes cleaning so much easier the fifth tip is not really a maintenance tip but it's do some research on your wood pellets not all wood pellets are created equal some of them are all hook hickory with just oils of different flavors of of woods on there they're not 100 of whatever that wood is so do a little bit of research find out ones that work good for you i learned recently actually that yoder uses the bbq to light ones and all their testing i don't know what that if that says anything for you i actually read some really good reviews on them when i first started and i haven't tried anything else there are some other brands out there that are good i just i've been really happy with my results on these so that's what i'm using if you're in the market for one of these here's five things i think that you need number one i've talked about it several times throughout the video the removable heat diffuser the grill comes with a solid one it will work perfectly fine that way um and you know if you put over your meat over the firebox you're going to be able to get a little bit of sear on that but honestly for being able to clean it easily and the ability to sear the removable plate is a must-have i i wouldn't advise anyone to buy one of these without it get yourself some go grill grates so grill grates makes these for any barbecue so if you don't have a pellet you could you can find them for any girl you want but here's what they look like right they are made out of a very hard aluminum they're raised on one side so you can get a great sear marks grill marks on your meat you can flip them over and use the flat side as well if you want but they are great if you look at some of the state competitions i can't remember what they're called but almost everyone is using those just because you can get such great grill marks on them but they allow you to get super hot because they're they're aluminum they really heat up well and you can get a great sear on them so that's a must have another one is you see these stainless steel shelves these are actually wire racks underneath and the stainless steel sleeves go over top of them wire racks great for a plate not so great for a barbecue bottle especially if it happens to be a glass one you knock it over it's just not stable i think that the the stainless steel sleeves are a must-have they have them for the side as well you can buy them individually so if you're fine with a wire rack over here you can if you buy the one that's on the side here you get some hooks so that you can hang your utensils there i i think that's just just a great thing to have in here i have that the rack that comes with it it's what they call the full rack right away i bought the half rack and just as it says it's a half rack it only goes here so the great thing about that is is that when you have a full bottom rack and you just need a little bit of extra room now you can use the whole area without having any issues when the when the full rack's in there it's just a little cumbersome to work on the bottom rack for me you know if you're doing six briskets or whatever it's great to have that big rack on top but if you've got a whole bunch of chicken wings or something across the bottom and you just need to uh a little bit of extra room up top the half rack is great or you can just pull it out but i think that the half rack is definitely a must have um and the fifth one is a cover cover is very important um the one thing about these pellets they uh i've dropped a couple but they turn into sawdust in the in the moisture so you do not want to get any water near the pellet hopper at all you want that covered at all times so buy yourself a cover they have one as you can see there's some some handles here on this guy so it's a little bit of an odd shape even the uh chimney here which goes down out of the way yoder has a cover that properly fix whatever grille you have whether it be the 480 or the 640. a little tangent here 40 is just a little smaller other than that it's almost identical except for here we have a damper and this damper slides over here and sits in the middle and then goes over to the right and the the premise there is is that if it's in the middle even heat if it's on the left it's hot heat on the the searing side and then hotter on the right side if you pull it all the way out don't let that be a buying decision for you buy it on size the damper it's in the middle all the time i never use it i've used it maybe once or twice it does make a little difference on the searing but if you got grow grates and you turn it up to 500 550 it's hot the you don't need the damper at all so buy it on size my opinion is you can never be too big so i think the 640 is perfect for everyone but that's up to to you and your family i mean we have there's two of us this is me and my wife i do like to entertain from time to time but i don't ever want to be in a situation where i don't have enough cooking surface and that brings us to uh suggestions for yoder really and of course i was able to come up with five of those uh we just talked about the cover i'm gonna talk about that one first the cover's great it's it fits well my problem with it is is it does leak moisture a little bit like if it's rained hard and i came out in the morning to use my grill like i've got water here and it's it's a whole bunch of moisture so the cover is not um it's not waterproof it's water resistant the whole thing isn't wet it's just a couple pieces and i don't know if that's going to migrate over time or what but you know obviously there's a little bit of rust you have to deal with so i don't if i can keep moisture off here i don't want to have moisture on here right so i think that the cover can be improved number two would be the whole heat diffuser panel i just i don't see a time when someone's not going to want that just there's too many reasons to have it if it's even if it's only for cleaning to make your life a little easier i just think that yoder should include that from from the get-go number three would be the app right so the app is good they use firewire or fire fireboard sorry and it's i think that it's fireboard's own app that's integrated with this it's great don't don't get me wrong you can adjust the temperature you can adjust your temperature probes you can make it come up to a certain temperature and if your meat's done you can have it come down to 200 degrees just to keep it warm that part's great i just think that it can be improved upon like you know having played with with the traeger you've got a whole app that has you know recipes and cook times and things like that i just think that that's something that that yoder could probably whether it be a yoder app that's dedicated to recipes or if it's integrated with the fireboard i'm not sure what the answer is to that i just think that it's something that they could probably do number four would be come up with a way to remove the pellets a little easier some a lot of the newer models of competitors they've got a door that opens up so you can scoop out pellets out the back some of them got a little shoot but you know i said it earlier the great thing about having a pellet grill is you can try a whole bunch of different pellets so what i normally do is i burn them down low and just top up as much as i need so that if i want to change the flavor next time i can you know there's been times where it's been half full and i'm like oh i'm going to cook this and i really want this kind of wood and i've got something else in there and you got to scoop them into a bucket and change it it's not a deal breaker but to add another door at the back or something just to help scoop it out would be a lot easier i think the final suggestion for yoder would really be to do with the diffuser right the diffuser tray um it is not painted or anything like that so it does rust now i have an upgraded not an upgrade but i have a replacement door because now now they come with a shorter lip it's a little bit difficult to grab with a glove on but the great thing is that if you're using grow grates it doesn't hit the lip like the other one did but you know the diffuser tray is rusty a little bit and you can see that this is already developing rust now this guy's never seen rain it's always covered like i said um so it's just developing rust on its own just for moisture in the air it's not a big deal because food doesn't touch it or anything like that but i think that yoda could probably maybe i don't know porcelain coat one and the reason for that is is that number one it wouldn't rust and number two would be a lot easier to clean uh that way you wouldn't have to use aluminum foil all the time and you know you would have a surface that's easy to clean and doesn't rust so that's just a thought that i had about it not a deal breaker by any means but i'm giving suggestions so there's number five hopefully you learned something new today and if you're in the market love my pellet grill happy i added one i was actually not planning on adding one like i said in the beginning last year at this time or well beginning of this the summer last year i had a komodo joe big joe which i had had for three and a half years and i just got this guy i actually have to do a one-year review on everything i upgraded to the komodo kamado sold the komodo joe to a buddy and uh you know the pellet grill was not something i was going to get but 14 months later i'm really happy that i did i do use it a lot i use you know all the grills so far the videos have really focused on this and really the reasoning behind that is uh you know some people i've talked to but when you're trying to build a youtube channel don't forget to subscribe um it's best to try and stick with a few things so i'm really trying to stick with the yoder and i've got some followers that we're either in the market or they're new to having a yoder so i'm happy to help them out as the channel grows a little bit we're going to diversify and use the other grills a little bit more but don't get me wrong i'm going to use this just as much as i am now it's a great great product that's all i got for you today hopefully you learned something new if you found it useful please give it a thumbs up again don't forget to subscribe hit the notification bell so you learn about new videos that are coming up i'm trying to do every new videos every single saturday so i'll see you soon [Music] do

Channel: Rum and Cook

Views: 72,509

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Id: BaqDqJ6Ljpc

Length: 23min 52sec (1432 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020