****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I picked up a Keveri H1 back in August and have cooked around 20-25 meals with it since then. It's a fantastic product and I love it, but I'll try to be fair and describe it honestly so you can make your own decision on whether or not it's right for you.For context, I've done low-and-slow cooks like pork ribs, ratatouille/tian, and pulled pork; mid-heat grilling like mussels, steaks, broccolini, asparagus, carrots, and all manner of potatoes (Potatoes Anna, Domino Potatoes, simple baked potatoes, charred sweet potato wedges, you name it); and fast high-heat cooking like skirt steak and Neapolitan-style pizzas cooked in 3 minutes flat at 900°F.I liken it to a YETI cooler, only made out of stainless steel. It was designed to be flexible, operating as any of a smoker, a grill, or an oven. The wide temperature range coupled with the large shelves and insulation make it rather unique amongst backyard cookers. Your experience with it will largely come down to what type of cooking you want to do with it.Comparing it to an oven, it has a lot more space and you get the wonderful depth of flavor from cooking with charcoal or wood. It's easy to bring up to temp and hold it there, and because the heat comes from the bottom instead of the top, it's more viable to create a steam-oven effect for baking breads and such. You don't get a broiler, but flipping food over and putting it closer to the bottom has a similar effect for many types of food.Comparing it to an offset smoker or pellet smoker, it's has a much smaller footprint and burns more efficiently. You can smoke two or three racks of pork ribs with a few pounds of charcoal briquettes and a bunch of small chunks of wood and get good flavor. You won't get as blue of smoke as you would from a true offset with very well seasoned firewood and a skilled operator, but you also aren't having to sit and manage a fire all day long. If you think of smoking as a hobby and something you enjoy developing skill at, you might want to stick with an offset, but if you want incredibly delicious food without a lot of effort, the Keveri wins over offset smokers. A pellet smoker is somewhere in between, being far more computerized and costing a lot more to run. Personally, I prefer the disconnected, more natural feel of cooking with the Keveri, but if you don't mind another digital device in your life and only want to smoke foods, a pellet smoker is an option.Comparing the Keveri to a charcoal grill, it comes down to size and convenience. A Weber Kettle grill isn't tall enough to cook many foods directly over the charcoals, so you wind up with a relatively small amount of usable space. You can use the Smoke Controller in the Keveri and have two large shelves of indirect heat above, or for higher heat cooking, you can put food on the bottom shelf alone right over the fire or coals. Depending on what you're cooking, you can also get a bit strategic about it, putting smaller veggies and such that you want to cook quickly with more intense heat on the lower shelf and larger, slower cooking meats and veggies higher up. The amount of food you can cook with just a few pounds of charcoal this way is kind of insane—I once did two chickens, a half-sheet pan of potatoes and onions, and some asparagus all at the same time with 3lbs. This all said, if you're having to manage the food frequently, it can get annoying to have to open the door and slide the shelves out frequently. The convenience of opening a Weber Kettle or traditional grill is nice in that case.I do still have a nice Napoleon propane grill that I use from time to time. It's convenient and gets up to temperature more quickly than the Keveri, which can take around a half-an-hour to be ready depending on the temperature I'm targeting. It's also hard to beat the practicality of the wings of a traditional grill and the lower storage many have. It takes up about 3x the space on my deck as the Keveri, though, and doesn't roll around nearly as easily.About the only complaints I have about the Keveri are 1) that it's a pain to clean (like pretty much all grills) and 2) when you pull the shelves out to flip food, the food drips on the inside of the door; when you close the door, that grease and such drips down and leaks on to the lower door and looks ugly. Personally I don't think these are deal breakers, though.
