Anyone can cook a burger on a grill. And, with a little practice, getting a steak seared right isn’t an especially onerous task. Briskets, though, require something of a deft touch.
Temperatures have to be monitored and maintained over a cook time that can run 15 hours or more. You have to know just when to pull the meat off the grill. And there’s plenty of prep beforehand. But what if artificial intelligence could take some of that work off your shoulders?
The Brisk It Grill promises to make barbeque … well, if not effortless, then a heck of a lot easier. And that was a vow we couldn’t resist putting to the test. It’s far from the first smart grill, but it’s one of the first to claim to be able to manage the cooking process start to finish.
To test those claims, we cooked three 15-pound briskets (our thanks to Snake River Farms for generously providing those) on three different smart grills. In addition to the Brisk It Zelos-450, we also used the new Big Joe Konnected Joe Digital Charcoal Grill & Smoker and a Masterbuilt Gravity Series XT. The Kamado and Masterbuilt aren’t technically AI grills, as they don’t provide cooking times or directions, but they monitor and maintain the grill’s temperature to ideally ensure an even cook.
Once the briskets were finished, we gathered folks for an old-fashioned blind taste test, so as not to prejudice people one way or another on the topic of AI.
Here’s what we were looking for: A sumptuous, melt-in-your-mouth cut of beef that’s craved by everyone from your toddler to your neighbor Bob. (My vegetarian girlfriend? That’s a much tougher hill to climb.) Since cooking brisket the standard way takes a lot of in-person supervision of the grill’s temperature (as well as some optional manual steps), we wanted the AI to take over some of the heavy lifting, giving us the freedom to walk away from the grill without worrying about things going awry.
While cooking a brisket with the help of technology is certainly easier than tending a traditional smoker, there was still more work than you might expect for each of these smart grills. Here’s how the experience went.
A late-night start
I’ve got a little experience cooking brisket – and my neighbor Gus is an especially talented cook – so together, he and I trimmed and prepped the briskets for the grills, estimating how long it would take to cook the meat. We calculated 15 hours, followed by a rest of between one and two hours in a cooler before serving, would be about right.
At 10:00 p.m. on Saturday, I started lighting the grills. By 11:00 p.m., the cook had begun. And it wasn’t long before some of the strengths and weaknesses of each grill became evident.
The Brisk It uses wood pellets as its fuel, much like Traeger’s popular line of grills. The hopper for the 450 seemed small to me – and I was concerned that it could burn through all of its fuel source while I slept that evening. (I was very much mistaken, as it proved to be remarkably energy efficient – something that was particularly notable since the grill’s body had the thinnest shell of the three.)
I opened the Vera AI assistant that’s part of the Brisk It app and said, “Let’s cook a brisket.” It quickly called up a recipe, with both the preparation steps and cooking instructions. The prep was a bit basic (trim excess fat and apply dry rub), forgoing brisket basics like rubbing the meat with mustard as a binder for the seasoning, but still forgivable.
From there, I was able to transmit the cooking directions over to the grill with the press of a button. The Brisk It preheated itself to 225 degrees, then notified me it was ready to start the cook.
The Kamado, meanwhile, quickly got up to its assigned temperature and never deviated from it. It was far and away the winner for consistency – and also proved to be very efficient with its fuel source. Throughout the cook, there was no need to add more lump charcoal – and there was plenty left over by the time I took the brisket off the grill.
The Gravity XT was a bit more temperamental. The grill has a large hopper, which Masterbuilt claims holds up to 12 hours’ worth of lump charcoal, and feeds the heat to the cook chamber via a fan. Despite setting the temperature of that grill at 275, it shot up to 325 degrees initially and hovered there for about 20 minutes before coming down to where it was supposed to be and fluctuated slightly throughout the cook.
An early morning
At 5:00 a.m., my phone sounded an alarm. It was the Brisk It, telling me it was time to wrap the brisket in butcher paper. I tried to ignore it, but the follow-up alerts were persistent, so I made my way outside and got to wrapping.
To my surprise, the probe in the brisket on the Kamado showed that it was nearing the end of its cook, much earlier than expected. I pulled it from the Kamado at 9:00 a.m., when it hit 205 degrees. (In retrospect, given how well that grill holds heat, a lower cook temp would have been wise.)
The Masterbuilt, I noticed, was running low on charcoal, which was curious. I filled the hopper halfway, figuring that would be more than enough. (I was wrong.)
At 9:15 a.m., I got another alert from Brisk It that its brisket was finished. That’s when I began to doubt the strength of the AI. The probe showed the temperature to be just 193 degrees, a fair bit below the ideal temperature of 205. I left it on the grill. I was on my own.
At 12:15 p.m., the probe registered 205 and it was time to keep the brisket warm. The problem was: I was out of the house. Fortunately, the Brisk It app has a genius feature that remotely lowers the temp of the grill to 180 degrees and keeps food warm. One button press later, it began transitioning to that, removing any stress on my end.
At 1:00 p.m., I went to check on the final brisket, only to see that the Masterbuilt had again run out of charcoal, which was frustrating. I refilled it a third time and bumped up the cook temp to 300 degrees. The brisket finally finished cooking at 3:30 p.m. – giving it just enough time to rest before the 5:00 p.m. taste test.
Why a smart grill?
The outdoor cooking industry had sales of $6.8 billion in 2022. Allied Market Research estimates by 2032, the barbeque grill market will more than double in value to $12.8 billion.
The audience, though, has stagnated a bit. Grills aren’t an annual purchase for most people. And while grill makers offer plenty of accessories to boost revenues between big purchases, from pizza stones to specialty pellets or charcoal, the manufacturer’s dream is to expand the audience without alienating the existing customer base.
Proponents of AI in outdoor cooking say it simplifies the process. Seergrills, a startup out of the U.K., turned heads at CES in 2024 with the Perfecta, an AI-powered vertical infrared oven with built-in temperature sensors that recognize when the food has reached your preferred temperature, whether that’s rare, medium or well, then shuts the heat down.
Weber, in 2021, acquired smart appliance and technology company June, which it had previously worked with to develop its Weber Connect grill technology. And the Konnected Joe line lights charcoal with the touch of a button.
“We designed this product [the Komado Joe Konnected] to go after a new category of folks,” Josh Silva, VP of marketing at Middleby Outdoor, makers of the Komado Joe and Masterbuilt lines, told Fortune last year.
And the winner is…
I have to say, I began this experiment with a bit of a bias. BBQ, especially brisket, is very much about the love put into the cook, so I had doubts an AI-nursed one could deliver impressively tasty results. But the Brisk It performed better than expected (though I can’t give the AI all of the credit, since it wanted to pull the meat from the fire hours before it was truly ready).
The friends, neighbors and loved ones who took part in the voting ranked the brisket from the Kamado third (and, in fairness, I’ll own that for arguably cooking it a bit too hot and fast). The Brisk It brisket came in second, with lots of compliments on its tenderness and taste.
In the end, though, it was the brisket that caused the most headaches that was the runaway favorite with the neighborhood tasting crew. The Masterbuilt-cooked one received almost double the votes of the other two combined.
In fairness, none of the briskets was disappointing. All came out tender and juicy. And most people had second helpings of each. The takeaway, though, was one that could easily apply to AI as a whole. While it’s certainly a capable technology that makes jobs easier, in the end, it takes a human touch to create something that’s truly worth your time.
