When it comes to electric grills, nobody is innovating like W.C. Bradley Co.’s grill brands. Charbroil, and now Current Backyard, already have the most advanced electric grills on the market, and if a recent patent is any indication, it’s going to stay that way.
Current Electric Grill Technology
The Model G from Current Backyard delivers on its promise of giving a gas grill experience. With more traditional cooking grates and temperatures to 700 degrees F, it is a steak cooking machine.
With their grilling technology, gone are the days of cooking a non-stick hot plate that resembles a grill. As good as their grill is though, improvements may be in the near future.
The Charbroil EDGE and Current Model G use a Calrod heating element that converts electricity to heat through resistance. The element heats the cooking grates above it directly and through a reflector underneath it to optimize its efficiency.
As efficient as Current Backyard has made it, a Calrod inherently has flaws because the heat isn’t directional. Even though heat rises, it is disbursed everywhere and not just focused at the cooking grates.
While that happens in other fuel types, it’s more problematic with an electric grill because they are more power limited by a conventional outlet. W.C. Bradley Co. has other ideas how to increase the power, but it is a limiting factor.
Induction Grill
A solution to the Calrod heating element limitations may be another electric heating solution entirely. It’s induction heating, which is becoming more popularized on kitchen ranges.
Induction ranges work extremely well for cooking. They perform so well that Consumer Reports notes they routinely outperform every other type of kitchen range they test.
Induction heating works differently than a conventional heat source. Rather than emitting heat, they generate an electromagnetic field that transfers to a ferrous metal (magnetic), causing it to heat up.
That works well for heating pots and pans, but what about grilling where there isn’t something to heat? Well, with Charbroil’s and Current Backyards’ Amplifire heating system there is.
The heat source on both their gas and electric grills use infrared cooking where the Amplifire grates are heated to either directly cook on, or to cook food on a traditional cooking grate above. It’s a design that promises juicier food through infrared heating, like found on hot coals.
W.C. Bradley would just have to use a ferrous metal for their Amplifire grates to unlock the performance benefits of induction heating. It would be a huge step forward in heating times and control.
Benefits of an Induction Grill
The design in W.C. Bradley’s patent offers a number of performance benefits. Induction heating is a more efficient system because it’s directional, so you don’t have the heat waste you’d find with a Calrod heating element.
It also offers much more precise control. It can control not only temperature more accurately, but it can turn off instantly. With a Calrod element, even if you turn it off, it’s still going to be emitting heat until it cools off.
Benefits of W.C. Bradley Design
If it reaches production, the W.C. Bradley design would be a big leap forward in electric grilling. Looking at their portfolio, it would likely end up in the Current Backyard brand where it would be a perfect compliment to their connected grilling technology.
Beyond better and more efficient grilling, there are some other ideas in the patent which are clever. One is to put a fan inside the cook chamber to add convective cooking and not waste any of the heat loss from the grill.
Another is to maximize performance, the grill can sense when there’s food being cooking on each of the three zones. This allows it to turn off the zones automatically that aren’t in use and optimize the energy use.
They also have ideas about accessories that could be used with a induction heating design. One is skewers that would be heated. That would be a whole new way to cook because the inside of the skewered meat could cook along with the outside.