Kalamazoo Outdoor Gourmet News and Press

Men's Health Magazine
July, 2007

The Kalamazoo Bread Breaker Two Plus Smoker Box gas grill is put through a "Trial by Fire."

Trial by Fire

The MH barbecue challenge separates the backyard sizzlers from the fizzlers.

Buy a grill on BTUs alone and you could end up getting burned. "A lot of men make the mistake of obsessing over this number," says David Kamen, of the Culinary Institute of America, "but it's not all about horsepower." We torched, tortured, and tested more than 20 grills to arrive at the picks below, assessing materials, design, construction, and heat performance. The goal: to gauge prowess with a range of foods and demanding cooking conditions.

Start cooking! We subjected each grill to a battery of tests using an infrared thermometer. Here's what we looked at:

ACCELERATION (0°-500°F timed preheat)
Weeknight cooking demands speed. A quick time in this rapid-fire challenge shows powerful, efficient burners, solid construction, and materials that retain heat.

RANGE (highest/lowest sustained heat)
Steaks and burgers need scorching heat for a deep crust, while ribs and chicken need sustained low temps to coax them into a state of succulence. You need both temps.

RETENTION (recovery from 30-second lid lift)
You want a grill that rebounds like Rodman. To test a grill's resilience, we opened the hood for 30 seconds, then timed its recovery to the initial 500°F.

EVENNESS (adequate heat distribution)
We divided each grill's surface area into six zones and took sustained heat signatures from each. Ideally, there should be little or no variation among the zones.

THE GRILLMASTER

Kalamazoo Bread Breaker Two Plus Smoker Box

ACCELERATION: 7 minutes 15 seconds
RANGE: 895°F / 216°F
RETENTION: 1 minute 7 seconds
EVENNESS: 11 °F

The big-money Bread Breaker didn't disappoint, scoring top marks on highest and lowest heat and evenness of distribution. With 100,000 BTUs [primary burners] blasting over 864 square inches [primary cooking surface], plus an attached smoker and an infrared burner, this behemoth could slow roast a suckling pig or just sear a few steaks.