Kamado buying guide

This is the only question that really counts, and it is the one most people get wrong. They buy for the birthday with sixteen guests and then cook for two for the next three years.

A kamado run half full costs more charcoal and more warm-up time every session than a smaller one run full, and delivers exactly the same. The size you need is the size for a weekday evening, not the one for the exception.

This is the question that most often saves hundreds of euros and is least often asked. A kamado is a ceramic sphere; getting it to working height and on wheels needs a frame, and that costs between two and four hundred euros.

Some brands include it as standard and build it into the price. Others — Big Green Egg is the clearest example — sell the ceramic and leave the frame, the side shelves and the casters to be ordered separately. Two tickets a hundred euros apart can therefore actually be three hundred apart.

Almost everything in this category is ceramic, and there is a reason: mass. A thick ceramic wall holds a low temperature for hours without you touching it, and that is exactly what low and slow is.

Insulated steel — Weber is the exception here — is lighter, cheaper and up to temperature in a quarter of the time. Against that, it reacts faster to wind and to every time you open the lid. For grilling that is fine; for an overnight brisket it is work.

Kamados are pronounced seasonal products. The same model can cost a few hundred euros less in October than in April, and the struck-through price in the shop says little about it — that one stands all year.

So every product page shows what a kamado cost on the days we looked. While we have measured too little to say anything meaningful, it says that too. That is more use than a verdict resting on nothing.