I grill with charcoal. It tastes better to my lizard brain that likes Scotch neat, prose terse and car gears shifted manually. But aspects of grilling with charcoal can be a pain. There’s the rigmarole of getting the coals lit. And it’s more art than science, deploying a lifetime’s worth of accrued rules of thumb and guesswork adjusting to whatever meek or hell-blazing coals one managed to light. And don’t get me started on the semi-annual cleanup.
Kamado Joe’s new Konnected Joe ceramic grill offers a better way. It promises charcoal coal grilling without the imprecision and the ass pains and with some helpful app integration — albeit for cost of admission nearly eight times the price of my trusty Weber kettle grill. I’ve been testing it for about three months in my backyard, as often as travel schedules and the weather gods have permitted.
The Kamado Konnected Joe: What We Think
The Konnected Joe offers the precision, versatility and convenience of grilling with gas without having to give up the charcoal charm, flavor and residual odor on your clothing. It’s feature-rich. It’s easy to use. It’s pretty much the ultimate tool if charcoal grilling (and using charcoal for several other cooking methods) is your hobby and you’re ready to go all in.
But price matters. You can get a fancy kamado grill with fewer features for around half the price. And the Konnected Joe is a lot more than the cost of your standard Weber grill. If you're just cooking up dogs and burgers on weekends, the latter may be all you need.
Setup is a multi-person job
Assembling the Konnected Joe looked daunting. It arrived on a giant shipping palette (I received a call inquiring whether my driveway could accommodate a 48-foot trailer). And it came with more than a dozen boxes. Set up proceeded swiftly with the simple tools provided and photographic instructions until I reached a simple instruction to lift the Konnected Joe and lower it into the base I just built.
The Konnected Joe weighs 216 pounds. There isn’t much to grip onto beyond the base. My phone a friend or family member options available all had serious back issues. I ended up laying the grille on its side on the palette, screwing the base on from the side and somehow pulling it upright. I’d recommend enlisting at least one if not two friends and entertaining them with conversation and an adult beverage until needed.
The Konnected Joe is precise and versatile
The main virtue of the Konnected Joe — as it relates to cooking better food —is that it can autoregulate its temperature. It can be set to a specific temperature like a conventional oven and just as easily. Close the lid (made easy with an air-lift hinge). Select the temperature. Close the drawer. Open the vent as instructed. Return when the requested temperature is reached.
And the temperature regulation is just the start of the customization options for deploying the heat. The grill comes with a heat deflector split into half circles, allowing you to create direct and indirect zones. The grill grate itself comes in half circles and can be half or entirely swapped out for accessories like griddles and pizza stones.
The control and precision made me a marginally better and definitely more confident griller. I was able to keep the heat high and nail the crust on a rare filet mignon. I was able to better reign in the heat and cook hot dogs and sausages without charring and splitting them. I also found myself being more adventurous and attempting things that require more exactitude like grilled chicken and turkey burgers, which I normally avoid on the grill.
The Konnected Joe makes charcoal grilling very convenient
The bookends of charcoal grilling — lighting the fire and cleaning up afterward — are the main annoyances. The Konnected Joe makes them go away. You don’t need a coal chimney, lighter fluid, fire starters or an experienced hand to get the fire lit. You just press the automatic lighter button. The button turns red. A coil then lights the coal for you. Fin.
Cleaning the Konnected Joe is also much easier than a Weber. The ash (in theory) funnels down into a tray which you then remove, empty and return in about five seconds. In practice, you still need to coax the ashes to fall through the slats down into the tray. But that only adds a few seconds to the process.
The Kamado Joe app can be helpful, but it's not essential
As you probably expected from “Konnected,” Kamado’s Konnected Joe has a smartphone app (and connects to Wi-Fi to do firmware updates). Pairing phone to grill took about 30 seconds. It might be the easiest phone pairing I’ve done to a device. The app itself gives you a clear temperature readout which you can adjust remotely, an evolving graph of temperature over time and the capacity to track up to three meat probes simultaneously.
I haven’t found myself using the app much outside of deliberately testing it for this review, though I could see it being useful if you have an intricate slow-roasting situation. It did come in handy when I had to light the grill and duck out quickly to buy some beer. But the main thing the app relieved me from was having to stand outside with a drink and monitor the proceedings, which is the enjoyable part of grilling.
You have to be strategic about where you place the Konnected Joe.
Unlike your classic Weber, the Konnected Joe is electric. You need access to an outlet, which is currently requiring me to run an extension cord into my garage. You also need to connect it to your Wi-Fi signal, which may not be easy depending on when your router is. Fortunately, you don’t need to do massive data transfers. So even a weak signal will suffice.
What are the Kamado Konnected Joe alternatives?
The Big Green Egg is the name brand for kamado grills, to the point where more people will know that name than what a kamado grill is. One could consider the Kamado Konnected Joe a Big Green Egg, but enhanced. Big Green Eggs can get similarly pricey. But that's typically due to increased size or things like farmhouse table integration. There isn't a comparable Big Green Egg model with the same digital features.
