This Smart Electric Grill Can’t Replace Your Barbecue
Testing smart grills has raised a philosophical argument over what constitutes a “barbecue”: Must all barbecues involve actual fire (or just heat, like infrared)? Is it assumed all barbecues are also smokers? In the end, it was one specific grill that provided clarity for me around these questions. The Current Model G Dual Zone Smart Grill is decidedly not a barbecue. While it is meant for the outdoors, requiring outdoor-sized real estate, and it will put grill marks on your food, this electric grill is just that—a grill. Simply put, it was like taking a giant George Foreman grill out on the patio.
While I appreciated the connectivity and size of the grill area, I was not a fan of the flimsy physical build. Though the grill did get quite hot and was highly effective in cooking food, it took longer than a gas grill and about the same amount of time as a charcoal grill. And cleanup was a chore, despite a self-clean function. Ultimately, it just wasn’t worth the price of $999.99 to stand on the patio for the same effect on food as standing over the stove, so even if you are prevented from using gas, charcoal, or real fire on your patio, I’d probably choose a different electric grill.
It has a modern design, but flimsy build
If it’s been a while since you bought a barbecue or grill, the first thing to know is all grills arrive to you in many pieces and require hours to put together. The Current took two hours for me to build, and required an app for the directions, which isn’t as helpful as a printed manual when you’re outside in the sun, squinting to see detail from the video on your phone. Still, the directions were clear, and the parts were well-labeled. Some parts of the grill were inexplicably flimsy, though, while others, like the barbecue tools (tongs, spatula) were over-engineered to be sturdier than any barbecue tools I’d ever used before and came with interchangeable rubber grips.
The metal of the grill is held together by screws in most places, but also metal clips, and these proved to be worthless. In particular, the side panels that made up the cabinet underneath the grill refused to stay on. As soon as you’d clip a panel in, the slightest breeze would cause it to slide off again. Great attention was given to creating a sturdy, two-sided staging area for food in the cabinet, which I really liked. However, the entire grill is exceptionally light and even when fully assembled, it didn't feel solid—in fact, merely rolling the grill ten feet from the spot I assembled it caused enough vibration that the grill had lost all of its panels by the time it was in its new spot.
The grill has a large digital touchscreen that displays the temperature for both sides of the grill. It has 330 inches of cook space, which was the most of any grill I've tried, and the whole point of the Dual Zone is that you can have only one side of the grill on, or use both sides at different temperatures. There’s also a warming grate on the top half of the grill and two temperature probes to monitor your food. The grill has enough ports for two additional probes.
Other electric grills to consider:
Char-Broil® Patio Bistro® TRU-Infrared Electric Grill, $199.97
Weber Pulse 2000 Cart Electric Grill ,$1,068.98
It's hard to pair to the app
The Current Grill app is simple enough, with tabs for recipes and videos on how to use the grill. Through the process of testing products for review, I probably pair five to ten new products a week with my phone, and I struggle to remember ever having as much trouble doing so as I did with the Current Grill. Clearly, I’m not the only one: When you call support (which did answer the phone, even on a Sunday), Bluetooth and wifi problems are #3 in the phone menu.
After a day of troubleshooting, I was able to finally pair the app, but luckily, the grill doesn’t need the app to function. You can just turn it on from the touch screen. The benefits of the app were limited compared to other smart grills. You can’t turn any grills on remotely—that's a safety issue—but other grills offered a lot more functionality, even when the grill was off. The Current won’t let you access any information if the grill isn’t on, and when it is on and connected, you are limited to merely seeing and setting the temperature of the grill and the temperature of any probes that are connected. While the recipe section isn’t infinite, it did include enough recipes for any basic meal you’d throw on a grill.
It's slow to heat, with a high electrical draw
The whole point of this enterprise is to grill food, and in that way, the Current does a decent job. It can get up to temperatures of 700°F degrees on both sides of the grill, which sounded exciting since most electric grills can't achieve that. But even with the lid closed, it took almost 20 minutes to do so. As it is electric, and you’re not gaining any smoke or char effect, you might as well just turn your stovetop on—it’ll take less time to heat a stovetop griddle.
This leads to another issue with the Current: It loses considerable heat with the lid open. Through grilling steak, chicken, corn, salmon, cauliflower, and a pork tenderloin, I observed the same things over and over. If you got the grill very hot, you could get a nice initial sear, so long as you immediately closed the grill top, but if the lid was closed, it would take a long time for the grill to adjust to a lower temperature to cook items through. You could get around this problem by just leaving the grill lid open for a minute, though, because the heat loss was so dramatic that you really couldn’t cook much with the grill lid open. Since the lid is solid metal, this meant you couldn’t see what was happening on the grill top unless you opened it up, at which point the temperature would drop by 150 degrees. All the while, the electrical load the grill is using is not minimal at 1750 watts. Current recommends a dedicated circuit, which I did not have on the patio, and if you also do not have this, expect to have to flip a few circuit breakers through the process.
Smart barbecues (not electric) to consider:
Disappointing self clean
Cleaning any grill is a chore, so I was excited about the self-clean function on the Current grill, which takes thirty minutes. At the end of each grill session, despite pre-seasoning the grill and using a liberal amount of oil, the grill plates would have a lot of stuck-on gunk, but that's true of any grill. Scrubbing with the brushes that worked on other grills didn’t do much with the Current since the cooktop isn't an open grill but a series of wavy metal plates. Sadly, the self-clean function seemed to result in the opposite effect you’d want. The grill somehow looked worse after self-clean, no matter how many times I ran it (see above). Removing the grill plates altogether and scrubbing them inside was the only way to really get them clean.
Bottom line: There are better options
I imagine that someone who buys an electric grill is doing so to avoid messing around with charcoal or an open flame. The food I cooked with the Current certainly turned out fine, and though it lacked the smokiness and char that a flame would give you, the food otherwise compared well to it’s barbecue counterparts—but it was also clear to me that the whole point of barbecuing was that effect the fire and smoke has on food. Still, even at a much lower price, I’d have issues with the build of the Current, which I fear would not withstand a strong windstorm after a long, complicated build.
The connectivity did not provide enough functionality for the pain of getting the connection up. Ultimately, you’re spending almost $1,000 to cook on the patio with less efficiency than your stovetop, for the same effect. If you had to go electric, I’d go with a far less expensive grill, and I might be willing to sacrifice the size of the active cooking space to get more consistent heat.