Kamado-style grills have long been a backyard favorite for many households, with their precise temperature control, cooking versatility, and Japanese aesthetics making them stand out among backyard cookers. The Kamado Joe Konnected Joe turns the popular egg-shaped grill and turns it into a connected appliance.
That’s right, that goofy-looking ceramic grill in the backyard has Wi-Fi now. No need to miss a minute of action in the game by having to check on food cooking the backyard – this thing lets you control everything from the companion app, so you can monitor everything while keeping your butt glued to the living room couch.
The Kamado Joe Konnected Joe is a thoroughly modernized version of the traditional Japanese grill. It retains many elements of the outfit’s standard offerings, from the egg-shaped body and textured ceramic shell to the top vent and Air Lift hinge that lets you raise the lid with ease. Unlike previous versions, this one comes with an automatic ignition button that can instantly ignite your charcoal with a single press, sparing you from the hassle of lighters, kindling, and all that laborious mess, allowing you to get the grill hot enough for cooking in as little as 15 minutes. There’s also a fan that circulates air inside the cooking chamber to ensure even heating and automatically adjusts its speed to control the temperature, allowing it to maintain a steady and precise temperature between 225 to 700 degrees Fahrenheit.
It comes with two grates, each covering half of the cooking area, so you can separate different types of food and cook them at different temperatures, if needed. It has a total of 250 square inches of grilling space, by the way, which should give you enough room for 13 burgers, four whole chickens, or two pork butts. Yes, the darn thing can accommodate a crapload of food.
The Kamado Joe Konnected Joe has a digital display that shows a 24-hour temperature graph, cooking modes, and other pertinent information. There are also onboard buttons and a control knob for setting temperature, time, and cooking modes. Of course, you can also do all that from the companion app, so you can make adjustments on the fly without having to be anywhere near the backyard. You can manually set temperature and time, so you can grill or smoke food manually, although it also offers an Automatic Cook Mode that will handle all the nitty-gritty. The app, by the way, gives you access to a recipe library, which should help remove a lot of the guesswork when manually adjusting the settings.
Features include a meat probe which can monitored from the app, lifting handles for safe loading and unloading, folding aluminum side tables, a slide-out ash drawer, and heavy-duty powder-coated steel base, and a number of accessories. It measures 48 x 47 inches (height x diameter) and weighs 216 pounds, so you won’t be able to move it easily, although it does have locking casters that you can use to push it around the backyard.
The Kamado Joe Konnected Joe is available now, priced at $1,699.
