Best Barbecue Grills For Your Budget

Best Barbecue Grills For Your Budget, To get a top-performing brand it isn’t necessary to pay top dollar – but watch for tradeoffs in materials. With the Fourth of July right around the corner you’ll see some prices drop in the grill aisle. Sales have been lackluster lately, but many of the gas grills tested by Consumer Reports were anything but. Inexpensive grills offered impressive cooking and midpriced models were loaded with premium features such as searing burners, lights, and thicker stainless-steel grates. But there are trade-offs.

Smaller cooking areas, thinner shelves, more painted metal, less stainless and lower grades of stainless, which is more prone to rust and corrosion, were some of the trade-offs we found. How to choose? Start with a grill that sizzled in our gas grill tests then consider our shopping tips. We cooked 1,070 pounds of steak, chicken, and salmon on more than 80 models, and the very best aced our tests by serving up nicely seared steaks and moist chicken and salmon grilled over low heat. The models we recommend also excelled at indirect cooking, which allows you to slow cook roasts, ribs, and whole fish and poultry by placing them next to the heat, not over it.

Even better, while the grills we tested range in price from $100 to $3,500, our standouts are affordably priced from $300 to $950. Paying $100 doesn’t get you much cooking prowess but paying top dollar isn’t necessary either. Here are some of the good performers from our tests, categorized by the size of the cooking surface. Larger grills usually have bigger cooking areas, but there are exceptions so we measure the main cooking area; manufacturers might also count warming racks and searing burners in their claims but we don’t.