From images of abandoned disposables at various beauty spots around the UK to fingers being pointed at silver tray barbecues as the cause of wildfires in our tinder-dry countryside, it’s fair to say that barbecuing in public has got a bit of a PR problem at the moment.
However, that doesn’t mean you need to be confined to the back garden or balcony as barbecue season gets under way. A quality, purpose-built portable means you can change the backdrop for your latest burger broiling session and feast on all your favourites, wherever you’re headed to.
Gas or charcoal, a good portable should be able to do almost everything their more rooted versions can do, just on a smaller scale. With gas models, we were looking for barbecues that allowed us to control the heat easily and feature a gas cylinder attachment that works with, not against you. While charcoal versions needed to be effortless to load and light and make it easy to manage the charcoal throughout cooking.
That’s where the differences end though, because both need to provide even heat distribution across the grill, so you’re never caught out with hot spots that will lead to burnt food. And speaking of the food, portables are usually best at quick cooking (rather than low and slow) so they should be particularly suited to searing, while also imparting a mouth-watering charred taste to everything else that ends up on your plate.
It needs to do all this in a usable design that makes it easy to carry to your destination or just load up in the car boot. So, we grabbed the barbecue sauce and went mobile, firing up as many portables as we could get our tongs on to see which ones were best at replicating what the big grills do.
How we tested
We took our grills with us for days out on the beach and on to Dartmoor and thoroughly tested their searing credentials, loading them up with burgers to see which ones would pass the patty test by delivering juicy protein with a nicely fired crust. We were feeding a family who all had different requirements when it came to how they wanted their burgers cooked, which gave us an opportunity to see how easy each barbecue made it to cook to order.
Throughout each grilling session, we also noted how stable the barbecue was and how easy it was to manouvere our food around the grill without losing it to the sand (or the dog). And when we were done cooking, we focused on how hassle free the packing up process was from cooling to cleaning up, so that we left a minimal footprint behind. These are the hottest ones on the market.
The best portable BBQs for 2023 are:
- Best overall – Campingaz attitude 2go CV: £193.19, Amazon.co.uk
- Best for portability – Everdure cube: £199, Johnlewis.com
- Best for campers – Cadac citi chef 40: £164.44, Amazon.co.uk
- Best for large groups – Weber Q 2000 gas barbecue: £435, Weber.com