TESTED TRAEGER PRO 575
Get the patty smarted Traeger’s plug-in grill is a connected wood-fired furnace for keeping tabs on slabs and kebabs via your phone £899 / stuff.tv/Pro575 Q If you’re the sort of person who thinks BBQs are a faff and a surefire way to get food poisoning, then Traeger’s Pro series might just change your mind. That’s because this hardwood pellet grill uses oven-like digital temperature controls and a meat probe for seriously easy and precise cooking. Q Plug the grill into the mains, prime the auger motor that pushes the pellets along a kind of conveyor belt to a fire pot, and you’re ready to go to work. Traeger’s motto of ‘Set it and forget it’ then kicks in. Select your preferred temperature using the dial and you’re done. Oil be gone The Pro 575 needs a 40-minute one-off pre-burn before you can start slapping steaks on, in order to remove manufacturing oils from the grill.
Q OK, not quite done – but only because things get even easier. Connect the Pro 575 to Traeger’s app and ‘WiFire’ tech lets you control things from the couch by changing or monitoring temperatures, or activate Keep Warm Mode – handy if your game of beer pong has gone into overtime. Q You’ll find over 1500 recipes on the app, which also includes Apple Watch integration and works with Google Assistant and Alexa smart devices – where the novelty of asking your chosen AI butler to crank things up to a 500°F is unlikely to ever wear off.
Q Roast in the machine
Q Don’t bake me wait
The drum design equates to 572 square inches of cooking space. Traeger reckons you can pack in 24 burgers, five rib racks or four chickens. Grill, smoke, bake, roast, braise or BBQ: it’s a 6-in-1 cooker, and that includes pizza.
The worst thing about any BBQ is waiting for it to get hot, but Traeger has addressed this. We managed to hit the maximum 500°F from a cold start in about 15 minutes – and the cooker runs in near-silence to boot.
Q The grill’s chimney isn’t there for show: this baby is a smoker. That means bags of flavour for your food (you can even get flavoured pellets) plus consistent results whether you like it low and slow or hot and fast. Kinky.
Tech specs Cooking area 572 sq in Max temp 500°F (260°C) Dimensions 135x103x65cm, 56kg
STUFF SAYS A solidly built, simple-to-use grill packed with connected add-ons +++++ If a normal barbie makes you feel as useless as Barbie, this grill’s for you James Day
As an absolute amateur when it comes to outdoor cooking, the thought of testing a Wi-Fi-enabled pellet grill felt pretty intimidating… but Traeger made things so easy I found myself cooking via my phone while the football was on. The app is brilliant, and any accusations that connected cookers are ‘overgrill’ were quickly dispelled. Use the all-terrain wheels – this thing is heavy – but otherwise the Pro 575 is pure fire.
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