15 out of 15 people found this review helpful.
Great grill for the price
Date of Review: Dec 6, 2006
The Bottom Line: If you want an entry-level grill on a tight budget, you can't find more bang for your buck.
For the price, this is one of the best grills you can buy. It is feature-rich, decent-sized, and well-designed.
I bought a Santa Fe as a trial grill after my gas grill died. The idea was to cook on a lower-priced grill for a year to decide whether I wanted to replace my gas grill with another gas grill, or whether to switch to charcoal. A good deal of research went into the "which grill?" question. In the end, I settled on the Santa Fe.
The Santa Fe has several features that are typically associated with a more serious charcoal grill:
- a front-load door
- easily adjustable airflow controls on the top and bottom
- adjustable charcoal tray
- large cooking surface
- high lid, so you can put large objects (chickens, turkeys, etc.) in the grill
Let's consider these features in the same order:
First, the front-load door is great for long-term cooks. You know what I mean, real barbecue cooked at 200F for 12--18 hours. The front door on this grill has two problems, though. First, the latch is small and not easy to get a handle on, especially when it's hot. Second, the door itself is too narrow. A wider door would definitely be better. I ended up contorting my wrist in all sorts of interesting ways to try and move charcoal around in this thing.
The airflow controls for this grill are fine, except the grill itself is not airtight. So they don't work the best. This isn't a showstopper: with a little high-temperature silicone, the grill could be fixed. I never bothered, but it could be done.
The adjustable charcoal tray has the same problem all the Char-Broil grills have: the tray hangs only at certain levels. On this grill, it hangs on four little posts, which rest on the top lip of the grill. There are three levels of the posts (12 posts in all), so you can adjust the charcoal height to one of three levels. The bottom was reasonable for slow cooking, but at its highest, it wasn't hot enough. This was easy to solve: I put a couple bricks on top of the tray, and laid a grate on them. This raised the charcoal to just below the cooking grate, which gave a great sear to steaks. Not a show-stopper, but I shouldn't have to do that. There is one more problem with the tray: it is perforated to let the charcoal get air, but the perforations are too small or too spread out. It seemed hard to get the charcoal really blazing on this grill. Again, the bricks and grate I added took care of this nicely, but again, you shouldn't have to do that sort of thing.
The cooking grates are made of some sort of metal covered in porcelain. Porcelain ain't my thing (I prefer cast iron), but the grates seemed to work all right. Having said that, there is a single large grate on this grill, which is an oddball size (I think it's 27.5" X 19", but I don't remember for sure), so you can't find after-market grates to replace it. The single grate is only an annoyance, but all the other grills I've had, had multiple smaller grates, so I could move them around, etc. My grate broke within a week of purchase: one tine actually came loose from the frame at one end. This never proved to be a problem, and none of the others ever broke, so I assume that's an anomaly.
The high lid on this grill is perfect. You can fit a LOT of meat on this grill: I was able to barbecue 6 racks of ribs at a time.
A word about the built-in thermometer: this thing is basically useless. It has three measurements on it: "Warm", "Ideal", "Hot". That doesn't tell you anything of any value. I did find that I could get it hot enough to sear a steak once the thermometer went past "Hot" and back around to "Warm". Now, I have a couple grill thermometers, so I just ignored the one on the lid, but be warned.
The only real problem with this grill was the flimsy construction. This is basically a cheap CB860x, and it shows in the construction. If it had been made better, air control would be easier. As it is, you can't completely choke down the fire in this thing, and I just got used to letting it burn out. The thin metal makes it hard to slow cook, as every gust of wind lowers the cooking temperature noticeably. Conversely, temperature spikes become an issue, as there isn't enough metal to absorb those variations. Admittedly the grill was easier to move around than my Bar-B-Chef Texas, but I'll take the annoyance of the weight over the annoyance of the flimsiness any day.
