The Zelos-450 Pellet Grill Has Features Missing on Grills Triple Its Price

Grills do not need AI, but you may need an AI grill. When it debuted at CES earlier this year, the Brisk It Zelos-450 was billed as “the first grill with generative AI.” This AI comes in the form of “Vera,” an in-app feature that “creates personalized recipes based on your feedback” and then adjusts the grill temperature to cook them.

Photography: Martin Cizmar

The tech press spoke enthusiastically about the device earlier this year. I was less optimistic, which is why it took me the better part of a year to finally free the grill from its disintegrating cardboard box, which I finally did last week. The AI ​​is notoriously bad at recipes (unless you’re a sticky pizza lover), and who needs a recipe for a burger or steak? Since the grill can’t physically stop cooking and remove your meat from the grates, what’s the real difference between an authoritative AI voice telling you your food is done and a temperature alert coming from the probe? And yet, the Zelos is a great buy, especially when it’s under $300 during an end-of-season sale. This Wi-Fi enabled pellet grill has a great design and features you won’t find on grills twice or more its price.

I only played briefly with the Vera AI feature, which I found useless. When I asked him to give me a recipe for “coffee ribs with tequila sauce,” he simply added coffee to a standard rib recipe, then tequila to a standard barbecue sauce, in equal proportion to ketchup. (I didn’t make this recipe, but it certainly seemed to contain way too much tequila.) When I used the photo-based personalized recipe recommendation tool to give me a recipe based on a photo of ground meat, dill pickles, mustard, and eggs, Vera informed me that “the content of the image has nothing to do with cooking on a wood pellet grill.” Oh, oh. However, the grill doesn’t need AI to be a winner.

If I was looking to get a good Black Friday deal on a pellet smoker or small backyard grill, the Zelos-450 would be my choice. Here’s why.

Courtesy of Brisk It

Lively

Zelos-450 Smart Grill

It is well packaged and easy to assemble. Take it from someone who tested a half-dozen grills for WIRED: too many of them are beasts to assemble, coming with more than 100 screws and confusing instructions. I lost an entire Saturday to grill assembly, which is a big part of why this grill sat in the box it came in for about eight months. The ease of assembly was a pleasant surprise. Every part of the Zelos was clearly labeled and the instructions were clear. It went from box to break-in in 90 minutes, and could have been done in less than an hour with more diligence.

It’s pretty stylish (for a grill). Lively This doesn’t put Thaan or Nomad out of business, but I challenge you to find a grill this good looking at this price, especially a full-featured smart grill. It features a minimalist design with clean lines and a few appropriate touches of stainless steel trim. The pellet hopper, grease trap and wheels all work as expected. There is only one control button, which does everything you need.

Brisk It app via Martin Cizmar

It has a powerful and efficient application. Grill control apps tend to exist on a spectrum between frustratingly glitchy and completely unusable. The Brisk It app is extremely simple, completely intuitive and has worked perfectly every time I’ve used it. To automatically turn on the grill, you swipe a bar on the app to the right. You’re advised to only do this while standing next to the grill, but I decided to take an extreme risk for science and fired up the grill from my bed, just as I would if I were getting up before dawn to smoke two racks of 3-2-1 ribs to serve at a football game’s noon kickoff. You can adjust the grill temperature and plug in a probe to receive alerts when what you’re cooking reaches the desired internal temperature. When it’s time to turn off the grill, simply slide the same bar to the left and wait 20 minutes for the fire to go out. These are features not found on much more expensive grills: The MasterBuilt Gravity Series 1150, which we call a budget pick, actually costs almost four times as much and doesn’t have automatic ignition. You can use any brand of wood pellets in its 12-pound capacity hopper.

There are some drawbacks.

This grill is rather small. Speaking of two racks of ribs, that’s about all you have room for. The marketing copy advertises room for 15 burgers, but I’d comfortably cook six burgers on it, maybe eight, but never 10. You could cook dinner for a family of four on this grill, but you won’t prepare a whole brisket for a party.