5 of the best BBQs for your summer sizzler

5 of the best BBQs for your summer sizzler

Quick! The sun’s out! Time to desert your perfectly serviceable kitchen and cook your dinner outside instead. If you want to avoid incinerating those sausages and steaks, perhaps it’s time to upgrade from those disposable barbies you keep buying from the supermarket. We’ve picked out five grills, from the affordable to the ostentatious. Culinary skills not included.

1. Bob Grillson Premium (£3749)

Because who wouldn’t want a barbecue called Bob? With the option of smoking, grilling, searing and baking at 400ºC this 4-in-1 monolith is a genuine al fresco cooker. Because it uses wood pellets rather than charcoal, you get that tasty woody flavour without the hassle or danger of starting real fires. Even better, it has a self-cleaning mode, is app-controlled and comes with two meat thermometers, so you can simultaneously count for different levels of doneness. Bob could be your new best friend all year round.

2. Notebook Folding Grill (£23)

There’s nothing like a barbecue to take the edge off another early England World Cup exit, but if your garden is smaller than Mo Salah’s turning circle, you’ll need a grill that’s so compact it can be tucked away on a shelf between uses. When unfolded, the Notebook’s grilling area is a generous 45x30cm, but it packs down to just 4.5cm thick. Considering it costs much less than the price of a replica Peru shirt, that could just make it your perfect garden griller.

3. Landmann Pedestal (£31)

Barbecuing is more than a method of burning your dinner – it’s a way of life. One that, in Blighty, we’re often robbed of as we usually enjoy fewer sunny days than some parts of Neptune. Make the most of the days we do get with Landmann’s stainless steel BBQ, which has a ventilation disc and removable ash catcher built into its pedestal, so you can keep the air flowing to your sausage-searing embers while avoiding soot spewing into the air like dirty confetti.

4. Firefriend BBQ Fire Pit (£118)

It’s all very well cooking your dinner outside, but if the sun goes down and you have to go indoors to eat it, what’s the point? Thanks to the strange ‘fishing rod’ contraption, you can hoist the grill off the base of the Firefriend once you’ve finished cooking the last steak and convert it into a fire pit, allowing the glowing embers to keep you toasty instead. It’s easy to do by turning the crank, so you can also adjust it while cooking to avoid incinerating your burgers.

5. BBQ Barbecue Smoker Round (£45)

With two tiers and the ability to barbecue, smoke or braise the food you chuck on it, there’s a versatility to this barrel-like beauty that makes the Smoker suited to cloudy days as well as the ones where picking up a new bag of charcoal and donning a string vest feels practically mandatory. There’s a built-in thermometer and stacked doors, giving you separate access to the food and the charcoal, so you can keep things hot in the engine room without letting all the smoke escape from your halloumi.