The fact that the AI cooking assistant is half-baked shouldn’t stop you from using the iPhone connectivity with the otherwise excellent Brisk It Zelos-450 outdoor grill.
As this piece goes live, May 28, it is both national brisket day, and national hamburger day. It seems only fitting that we look at an app-connected grill on this day.
Admittedly, both days are likely marketing exercises, but still.
Anyway, adding artificial intelligence to products, like this Zelos 450 grill, has become a staple of the tech industry. This plague is spreading to product categories that you wouldn’t otherwise expect AI to even touch.
When it comes to outdoor cooking, AI or not, physics remains the same. To assist the human cook lacking infrared vision, meat thermometers with Wi-Fi connectivity have become more common, as with other remote monitoring systems.
The Brisk It Zelos-450 aims to go one stage further. It’s a smart grill that uses both Wi-Fi and sports its own AI assistant.
If you read nothing else beyond this sentence, the grill hardware is excellent. The AI is crap, but fortunately you don’t have to use it.
Brisk It Zelos-450 review – Physical design
From the outside, the Brisk It Zelos-450 looks like a typical advanced outdoor grill. It has a main section for heating, taking the usual barrel shape, with a shiny handle that opens up the powder-coated top section to reveal the grill itself.
To the right is a shelf to aid with food prep, while the left has the wood pellet hopper. Brisk It handily sells their own supplies, but after eight cooks, I can safely say that they’re not needed if you use common sense and decent quality fuel.
Those wood pellets are burned and the smoke and heat sent through to the barrel segment, where the food is retained. Controls to the bottom left are used to manage the temperature and overall cooking process.
At 75 pounds, it’s a unit that’s not going to be quickly moved around, even with the use of the two weeks on half of the legs. It’s a grill, though, and some weight is to be expected.
And, since it’s electric, you’re probably going to need to be relatively close to the house anyway. The electrical cable is too short, I think, so maybe an extension cord is in order.
Putting it all together is reasonably simple, with an easy and quick assembly, especially by usual grill construction standards.
Brisk It Zelos-450 review – Cooking capability
While being roughly the same size of your typical garden grill, the Zelos-450 isn’t something that can cook a lot of food at once. The actual grill section itself is less than half the overall width, so you can’t really expect it to handle massive food loads.
The company has larger offerings, though. So if you need more volume or surface area, get one of the larger models.
That said, inside there are multiple layers of grill to play with. You get a teased-in-the-title total of 450 square inches for placing food inside, which is good for small gatherings or family feasts.
It’s fit a single pork shoulder or a ham just fine. Just don’t expect to have the space to do both and have a good cook.
Brisk It Zelos-450 review: The onboard controls, if you don’t use the connected app.
As a wood pellet smoker, it can handle a multitude of cooking tasks. It does get hot enough to use it as a igrill capable of searing and braising.
If you’re into slow cooking, it functions as a smoker and for roasting food. I think the main use for it is smoking.
With a temperature range between 180F and 500F, it can also be used for quick cooks and for low and slow hunks of meat.
Brisk It Zelos-450 review – Wi-Fi and AI
As a “Smart” grill, it offers a fair bit more than the usual backyard cooking device. You can connect it to your iPhone.
Establishing the connection is over Wi-Fi, with it hiding the antenna underneath the smoker controls. The smoker does absolutely insist on using 2.4GHz Wi-Fi networking, which isn’t ideal for people who may be using home Wi-Fi with 5GHz bands.
For instance, it absolutely would not connect to a bonded 2.4GHz and 5GHz network with the same SSID. Ultimately, I hooked it up, double-NAT style, with an old Airport Extreme base station with the 5GHz network disabled. Good enough.
Brisk It Zelos-450 review: The Wi-Fi antenna is underneath.
The point of the connectivity is primarily to monitor the cooking process and to remotely control it. Instead of being nearby and closely watching the food, you have the opportunity to be a little further away with less danger of overcooking the pork over hours.
Using the app to cook in this way is straightforward and works pretty well. The ability to adjust the temperature during a cook is extremely useful.
Then there’s Vera to contend with. The AI included in the Brisk It companion app, Vera is intended to be your very own pitmaster in your pocket.
This seems like a decent idea on the surface, especially for people who may not necessarily know how to properly barbecue food.
You can ask Vera to come up with recipes and flavor combinations depending on what you want to cook or your needs. For example, you could ask Vera for a way to cook food while considering food allergies of guests.
Equipped with the recipe, the user can prepare the food then set the grill going. Aside from preheating the grill beforehand, Vera monitors the cooking process, adjusting temperatures over time and accounting for unexpected changes.
Brisk It Zelos-450 review: Slow-cooking meat.
While the app certainly works well for manual cookery, leaving it to the AI isn’t as good as it might be. That’s to be expected, honestly, given that AI as a whole used for tasks like this is a plagiarism farm, stealing bits from here and there to make a recipe.
Beyond that, I had issues with some of the timing, like when to put the ribs inside the foil for the “Texas Crutch.” Having me do it nine hours before completion is just simply wrong.
Even worse, some flavor combinations it suggested were just bizarre and nasty. In no way am I including olives inside the foil pouch for the crutch for flavor.
Also, using pineapple as suggested by the AI for a marinade soak for 24 hours will lead to nothing good. Bromelain in pineapple will make the meat a disgusting bag of goo when in contact for that long.
Less dramatically, beer in a marinade is good in some meats, but not for beef — and it constantly told me to do so. Also, marinating a Filet Mignon is ridiculous.
A sketchy AI cook is no substitute for a human who even sort-of knows what they’re doing. Even a beginner cook with the internet, or a barbecue book and a good head on their shoulders shouldn’t rely on this AI.
At least, this how it stands for the moment. We’ll see what updates this AI gets.
Brisk It Zelos-450 review – use the grill with your cookbooks, not AI
Adding AI may be a leap forward for cooking technology, and it can certainly be a guiding hand for the inexperienced grill owner. It’s not quite at a state where you have a digital Bobby Flay, and it gets in the way of a more experienced cook.
As a software feature, this could always change in the future. App updates could bring with it versions of Vera that can make astounding cooking recommendations.
Looking at just the grill hardware, the Brisk It Zelos-450 is pretty good. I’m not a pitmaster by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve been smoking meats for 20 years, so I’ve got a leg-up on the target market.
Just the same, the grill only takes limited knowledge and experience. The average home cook should get some great results.
Zelos-450 grill review: The above pork shoulder after the smoke was done
The ability to remotely monitor and adjust the temperature is also very handy, as it leaves you free to do other things nearby or around the home.
A short grilling of a burger or something can be very social. A 16 to 20-hour pork shoulder smoke is decidedly not.
With the excellent app, you’re not left standing over the grill for an entire day to smoke a hunk of meat to perfection. Keep that wood hopper full, and you’re good to go.
Brisk It Zelos-450 Pros
- Versatile outdoor cooking
- Remote control and monitoring via app
Brisk It Zelos-450 Cons
- 2.4GHz Wi-Fi only. Don’t even try with a dual-band network.
- AI still no match for human cooking skill, and gets in the way
Rating: 4 out of 5
Where to buy the Brisk It Zelos-450
The Brisk It Zelos-450 is available directly from Brisk It for $449.99. It is also available from Amazon for $449.
