CES 2024: 6 grill companies introduce AI technology

CES 2024 had new innovations in food technology, especially for grilling. Pitmaster Christie Vanover shares her thoughts on what was shown.

This past week was a little hectic, but also full of adventure. I started it off at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I’m going to touch on some of that today.

Then I had a great meeting with some top women in barbecue. We’ve got some fun things planned for the future.

And then I finished the week off with a competition in Bullhead City, Arizona. Team Girls Can Grill finished 11th overall.

In this week’s podcast, I’m going to touch on artificial intelligence and grilling. You know, it’s really interesting because when you think of grilling and barbecue, it’s such a primitive experience.

You need fire, you know, some kind of fuel source and fire – I touched on this last week – and your food. That’s all you really need.

You don’t need artificial intelligence, but artificial intelligence, technology, automation, that is really starting to take over in our world. So the grilling companies out there are trying to find ways to make grilling easier for you.

Usually CES or the Consumer Electronics Show is really tailored around big brands and technology. But this year, there were six grill companies who showed up to show what automations they’re adding to their grills.

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Seergrills Perfecta Grill

I’m going to start with the Seergrills, because it was one of the most interesting grills that I saw out there. It was definitely unique, innovative and different from many of the girls that I’ve ever seen before.

The Seergrills company launched The Perfecta Grill. The Perfecta Grill is a cube that you set outdoors. It is an outdoor grill, but it cooks your food vertically.

It was super fascinating. So they had this vertical chamber that was spring loaded. You load your meat in it

Once you put the chamber into the grill, you use the touch screen digital display and select what you’re cooking.

Then the grill burns at 1,652F degrees. I mean, it is flaming hot. It has these two burners on the side and they adjust. This is where the artificial intelligence comes in. They adjust based on what you’re cooking.

So it knows if you’re cooking a steak and you want it medium rare, how often it needs to have those burners on. And then it kind of pulses them in and out, depending on your cook time.

The other thing that this grill does is it can cook pizzas. So pizzas, obviously, you can’t cook vertically or all the toppings would slide off. So the way that works is you take out the chamber that the steak would normally go into.

You place your pizza peel in the bottom. You turn the grill on. That heats up that metal plate so that when you place your pizza on it, the heat from that metal plate is actually going to cook your pizza dough.

Then, you program it for pizza and those 1,652-degree burners will pulse on and off just enough to melt the cheese and to crisp up your toppings.

They claim they can cook ribeyes in 90 seconds, so that’s pretty impressive.

I will say the price point is really high. It’s $3,500.

It’s really sleek. It would look really pretty on a backyard patio. And you’d definitely give a show. I mean, a lot of the people at CES 2024 were super impressed by the technology and it was just something that was really fancy that people like to look at.

So if you want to put on a show and you’ve got that kind of dough, then it’s definitely something that you may want to consider.

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Current Backyard Electric Grill

Another company that made its debut at CES 2024, is Current Backyard.

The Current Backyard Electric grill is similar in height and size to a standard gas grill, but it’s not fueled by gas. It’s actually fueled by electricity. So you plug it into the wall and then there are two burners that are infrared burners.

So once you plug this in, you just turn the dial and you can control the heat intensity of each burner.

The maximum temperature is 700F degrees, so you could get a really nice sear on this.

In addition to controlling the grill from the front panel, you can also download the app for your phone and control the grill temperature.

From there, you can turn the burners on and off. You can adjust the heat level. You can even use the internal thermometers that the grill comes with to monitor the temperature of your meat so that you can be somewhere else in your house looking at the app and figuring out how close your meat is to being ready.

I think the concept of the Current Backyard Electric Grill is really interesting, especially for those who aren’t allowed to have charcoal grills in their apartments or maybe in the county that they live in.

The price tag is around $900. So if you’re looking for an electric grill, it might be something worth considering.

Before I move on to some of my favorite grills that were on display at CES 2024, I want to touch on my least favorite.

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Brisk It NeoSear with InnoGrill AI

There was a grill company there called Brisk It.

To me, the technology was the same technology I see in all pellet grills, whether it’s a Recteq or a Traeger or a GMG.

You basically set the temperature of your grill. There’s an internal thermometer and it’s going to feed pellets and feed heat based on the internal temperature of your grill. It will automatically adjust the fan or adjust the auger for how many pellets are dropped in to control the heat of your grill.

So I don’t see anything really earth shattering or groundbreaking about that.

They did have a newer grill on display that isn’t out yet.

It has an electric heat source, so it has a burner in the bottom similar to the Current Backyard grill, but it does have the addition of pellets to add that pellet smoke flavor.

It has a similar automation that you’re going to get with a pellet grill. But where it said that it was unique and this is the AI and automation that it was introducing to the show was with their app and with their InnoGrill technology.

They said that you would be able to download the app and type in that you want to cook grilled chicken. You would give some basic details, maybe some ingredients that you have in your pantry, and the artificial intelligence would create the recipe for you.

So then it would tell you season your meat, heat your grill to the certain temperature and you would click to go to the next steps.

You add your your meat to the grill. It would tell you if you need to spritz your meat or if it’s time to wrap your meat and when your meat is done.

All of that sounds promising, but where I didn’t like this grill is the artificial intelligence, to me, wasn’t quite there yet. Now, they claim that they’re creating their own AI and that their team is actually developing the recipes and the coding to create the recipes.

But I went ahead and downloaded the app. I looked at the recipes it generated.

It said that beef ribs, like those dino ribs, would take 11 hours. That’s a long time. I cook my dino ribs in 5 to 6 hours.

It said that a flank steak should be smoked in about 2 1/2 to 3 hours. That too is a really long time. You’re going to end up with some beef jerky.

So I don’t think the AI technology is there, and what concerns me the most about this is that if you were to buy this grill and use this technology and you bought your brisket or you bought your meat and you followed all the instructions and put it on the grill and your meat didn’t turn out great, you’re going to maybe think that you’re not a good griller if you followed all the instructions that maybe you didn’t do something right.

When in fact, it’s actually the AI technology not really giving you the best guidance.

Instead, you should trust people like Girls can Grill or other great websites that actually have humans developing recipes where we know that we’ve tested them.

We know that their tried and true instead of just some automated information that may or may not be the most accurate information.

Let’s move on to some of my favorite grills.

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Kamado Joe Konnected Joe

Masterbuilt and Kamado shared a tent, and they were there with their newest lineup. They had the Kamado Joe Konnected, which is a grill that I already have.

It’s a charcoal ceramic egg, but it has the technology to make it so easy to cook on.

There’s a burner in the bottom of the grill, so all you have to do is add your coals and plug it in. You can push the button and that burner will heat up and actually light your coals for you so you don’t even have to worry about lighting them.

Then, you set the temperature and it will tell you exactly how to set the upper vent and the lower vent, and it will automatically control the temperature of the grill for you.

I’ve cooked on the Konnected Joe. I’m really pleased with the results. Super easy to light, super easy to maintain heat and if you still want to do the manual controls, you can do that too.

You don’t have to use the automatic controls, but they’re there if you want them and it does have an app. So again, you can monitor your cook time, your cook temperatures, your meat temperatures, etc., all from your phone.

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Masterbuilt XT and AutoIgnite

Masterbuilt also showed off a couple of their automated grills. I have the Masterbuilt 1050, which is a gravity-fed grill, which is charcoal and also runs like a pellet grill.

Well, they have a new one that’s called XT which stands for Extra Tough.

This one is a little bit larger in capacity, a couple hundred more square inches, but they’ve really made some improvements that I like compared to the 1050.

So with the 1050, there are two plates that you have to pull out. When you start your grill. There’s a big charcoal hopper that holds your lump charcoal or your charcoal briquettes.

You remove those plates, and that allows the oxygen to circle in to heat the charcoal up, and then also to allow the heat to go into the chamber.

Well, I have started my grill without removing those plates and realized 15 minutes later that my grill didn’t ignite because there was no oxygen going into the chamber.

With the XT, you don’t have those plates anymore. Instead, there’s just kind of this toggle that you move, and that opens things up so that the oxygen can feed through. And the digital panel tells you that you need to do that so you don’t forget.

Another change that they made with the Masterbuilt XT is that the manifold is now U-shaped, so that’s supposed to help with flare ups.

And then another thing that I like is that now there’s a pause button.

So because this charcoal grill operates kind of similar to a pellet grill, you’ve got a temperature probe inside the grill. When you open the lid, you’re introducing cooler air. So that temperature probe is trying to tell the fan, “Hey, we got to feed more air to this fire to get it going because the temperature is dropping.”

Well, now you can push the dial, and there’s a pause button. So it pauses this temperature probe and tells it, “Hey, don’t pay attention to the air right now. Just keep doing what you’re doing. Let the grill keep running.” And then once you close your lid, you press that unpause button and then basically everything goes back to normal.

So that’s a really great addition that they’ve made to that. Again, larger space, less flare ups, bigger hopper and then a couple of adjustments to how the grill works.

Plus, it has that app technology.

Masterbuilt AutoIgnite

The other Masterbuilt that I’m really intrigued about is the AutoIgnite.

It’s again about the height and the size of a gas grill, but it’s charcoal.

What makes it unique is that you have your grill grate and then there’s actually a hopper or a charcoal box that’s inside on the right side of the grill itself. You fill your charcoal in there.

They say it should last about eight hours. You put the lid on top, and the lid is metal and you can actually sear on it because it gets really hot. So you have kind of a sear station or a little griddle that you can use.

Then, the rest of the grill grate is just like a regular grill.

Similar to the Masterbuilt XT or to a pellet grill, the Masterbuilt AutoIgnite also has a temperature probe inside the grill that’s going to communicate with the fan.

So I’ve never actually seen a charcoal grill this size with this automation.

It’s a nice back patio size where you get charcoal and you get automation. So I was really impressed with that, especially since it’s only at a $500 price point.

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GE Profile Indoor Smoker

I think the most revolutionary grill of the show was from GE. Their GE Profile Indoor Smoker was definitely something that I’ve never seen before.

It looks like a vertical microwave, and then it has multiple levels where you can adjust the height. So you can fit a whole pork butt. You can fit a whole chicken or 40 chicken wings or even three racks of ribs that you cut in half.

So this is an electric smoker. You’re going to plug it in and it’s the electricity that’s going to create the heat.

The pellets are not actually burning to create heat. They’re just burning to create flavor.

You add two cups of pellets in the top of the smoker, and there’s actually a little drawer that you pull out and you add water in that in the bottom of the smoker.

Once you set your grill and you set your temperature, the electricity is going to control the heat level inside the grill and then the pellets are going to smolder and they’re going to start to smoke.

That smoke gets fed into the chamber of the grill, and then the pellets, once they’ve burned a little bit, are going to drop into that drawer of water. And that’s what extinguishes them.

So you don’t get the smoke inside the house from that. Then all the smoke inside the chamber actually flavors your meat and then it kind of gets sucked out to the back of the grill where it goes through a like catalytic converter type of process, or in other words, it just gets filtered.

So it cleans out that smoke so that any air that comes out of the grill is actually clean and not toxic for you so that you can cook with it indoors.

As far as the cooking process, there’s a digital control panel.

You can choose the meat that you’re cooking; you can choose the doneness that you want. There are internal thermometer probes that you can put into your meat, and it will monitor it and tell you how your meat’s coming along and how much time is left.

There’s also an app for this grill.

The price point for the GE profile indoor smoker is about $1,000 and it’s already available.

But I have to tell you, one of my favorite features about this grill, despite the fact that it’s pretty innovative and cool that you can smoke indoors, is the fact that the temperature goes down to 140F degrees.

The reason that’s important is because that is the safe temperature for holding food.

You can literally be laying in bed, get a notification on your phone that your brisket is ready. Then, use the app to adjust the temperature of the smoker to 140F degrees to turn it into a holding cabinet.

So that’s one of the features that I love the best.

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Weber Grills

There was another grill company that you may have read was at CES 2024 but they weren’t actually at CES. So Weber did come to Las Vegas during the CES show, but they didn’t sign up as an exhibitor.

I wasn’t able to go in and actually see all the new products that they were launching. Instead, they had a private event that was in another location in Las Vegas where they demonstrated some of their lineup.

You might be able to read about those different products, but unfortunately, as a CES media attendee, I wasn’t able to see those.

So that’s the lineup of grills that was at CES 2024.

I hope you guys enjoyed this week’s podcast. It was a little unique. We got to see some of the new trends in grilling related to automation and artificial intelligence.

I have another barbecue competition coming up this weekend. The Nevada Barbecue Association is putting together game on. We’re going to get a mystery box of ingredients. And it’s all going to be wild game. It should be pretty fun. I’m also headed to the fancy food show in Las Vegas this next week.

So there’s going to be a lot of specialty food items on display. I’ll share what I find with you guys.

Tune into more of my BBQ Tips podcasts or scroll around the website for even more helpful BBQ Tips.