Why I chose the Camp Chef Woodwind 36 as my new grill

For several years I’ve been running a Pit Boss 700 SC. It’s been a great grill. Reliable, fuel efficient, simple to use have and produced some great BBQ along the way. Even though it still runs like a top, I bought this grill before we started up You Need a BBQ and I thought it was time to upgrade to one of our new options as there are so many cool new grills out there.

If I was going to make this jump, I had several criteria I wanted to achieve to help narrow my choices.

#1 I wanted more space

The Pit Boss 700 SC was good for most types of BBQing. I could fit a few roasts on there or a good sized brisket, but I found I was struggling if I needed to cook for a lot of people or if I simply wanted to turn over a large item that was cooking. A larger grill was a must.

#2 I wanted more control

Pit Boss makes a great controller, you just turn a dial to a pre-set temperature and let it do its thing. It’s simple and reliable. For most of my cooking, this worked just fine, but I found myself more and more wanting more temperature options when I cooked.

#3 I wanted to be able to work remotely

When you first get a pellet grill, you get into that low and slow mentality. This means that I frequently would sit on the deck with the grill as an excuse to monitor it and drink beer. While I still like to sit on the deck and have a beer, I wanted to be able to be able to leave the cook for large periods of time and be able to tweak it if I wanted to.

Looking at all these new requirements, I narrowed down my choices to three grills:

There were several guys at the shop that have the LG 1200 Black Label or Premiers and love them. They had the space, control and Wi-Fi / Bluetooth capability that I was looking for. As per usual, I went against the crowd and dove into the Camp Chef Woodwind 36, and I’m sure glad I did.

I Love this Grill!

There are so many great features on this grill that I use all the time! I’ll list my favourite ones below:

Highly accurate controller. This controller let’s you change your cooking temperatures in 5 F increments and it found that it got up to temperature as quickly as my old Pit Boss and had less temperature fluctuations. Awesome controller.
Smoke settings. This is the first controller that I found that let’s you dial in the amount of smoke that you want for your cook, from 1 to 10. This is a very cool feature that I have not seen anywhere else. Works great!
Sliding top rack. The top rack has two sections to it on two racks, letting you create a small rack, one big rack, or something in between.
Ash cleanout. Underneath the grill is a cup that you can dump all of the ash from the burn pot into for easy cleaning without taking the grill apart. You still need to clean the grill, just not as often and you get more consistent cooks when you clean out the ash frequently.
The app! This is a Wi-Fi / Bluetooth enabled grill with 4 probes and full control of the grill through the app. This app is awesome and has never given me trouble. Camp Chef really put their time into this one.

My first cook on this unit was a Wagyu Cowboy Steak and some Bavettes.., so good. I have no hesitation if someone asks me about the Camp Chef Woodwind 36. “Don’t buy it because I want to have the only one!” This is an awesome unit, albeit expensive, you get what you pay for.