I will confess I was skeptical of a grill with Wi-Fi. Grills are about such elemental things—wood, fire, meat—adding Wi-Fi to that seems almost sacrilegious. Traeger was undaunted though. The company rolled out Wi-Fi in it's top end pellet smokers several years ago, and has slowly added the same features to cheaper models like the Ironwood 650.

The good news is that Wi-Fi on your grill turns out to be incredibly useful. This is especially true for very long cooks, like smoking ribs or brisket. Instead of hovering over the grill on a hot August Sunday, constantly checking the temperature, you can sit in air-conditioned comfort and control your Traeger from your phone.

### You Get What You Pay For

Traeger's Ironwood 650 is a pellet smoker with digital controls, and a Wi-Fi hotspot to connect your phone (which Traeger cleverly calls WiFire). The "650" moniker refers to grill space, in this case 650 square inches, which is plenty of room to smoke to racks of ribs, or about six chickens at time. It's plenty large enough for most people, though there is a larger model, the Ironwood 885. I highly recommend picking up the well-made [grill cover](https://fave.co/2F0NZbQ){: rel=nofollow} to protect your investment.

The Ironwood Wi-Fi allows you to connect Traeger's app for Android and iOS  to the grill. In the app you'll find everything you need to get started cooking, grill controls, recipes, cooking tips, and more.

The first thing that struck me about the Ironwood is how well thought out the packaging and assembly process is. I had it out of the box and ready to go in just over twenty minutes, which is considerably less time than I have spent assembling some of the much smaller [portable grills I've tested](https://www.wired.com/story/best-portable-grills/). The Ironwood's cardboard box also turns inside out to become a children's playhouse, a nice touch my kids appreciated.

This same level of care and attention to detail can be found in both the grill itself and the app that accompanies it, which is nice, because although the Ironwood strikes a good balance between features and price within Traeger's grill lineup, this is still not a cheap grill by any means. 

As a friend of mine is fond of pointing out, when faced with a problem, you can either throw money at it, or throw time at it. If you want to grill like a true pit master without putting in the long sweaty hours, you're going to have to spend some money. With the Ironwood I found it is possible to buy your way to successful grilling. And I don't mean, "that chicken was good dad" kind of grilling, I mean, "those are the best ribs I've ever had" grilling.

I started with brisket. Trial by fire. Or smoke at least. The Traeger app has a complete beginning to end brisket recipe with plenty of hand-holding to get you through what's probably the most intimidating cut of meat to cook. 

The setup is pretty easy. After you prime and run the grill once to get it ready, all you do is select the brisket recipe and follow the pre-heating instructions. When the grill is hot, insert the temperature probe in the brisket, lay it on the grill and relax, you're done. The brisket on the other hand will take another 10 hours, but don't worry the Ironwood 650 will take care of all that.

### Let the App Drive

You can keep tabs on the cooking progress of your meat through your phone, but the grill itself controls the temperature and amount of smoke and all the other details (some of which you can tune yourself if you want, but I recommend sticking with the defaults your first time through). 

The app is very nice, and similar to the Weber app we recommend in our grilling accessories guide. Like Weber's app you'll find a library of recipes and grilling guides. The difference here is that since the other end is built in to grill itself, Traeger's app can control the grill, precisely raising and lowering the temperature, feeding in pellets, and how much smoke is generated in addition to monitoring the temp of the meat. You can even, once you've found the recipe you want, send all the cooking instructions to the grill without even needing to go out and turn the dials. All you do is lift the lid and insert the meat.

As nice as that is, and as fool proof as it sounds, the proof is in the brisket as they say. I am happy to report that my first attempt at brisket, while it made no one's best brisket ever list, was not half bad. And if you know anything about cooking brisket, you know that's actually high praise for your first attempt.

My only real gripe with the Ironwood 650 is that I am not totally sold on pellets. I realize that the kind of precision control you get, and ability to do everything from your phone, only works because cooking with pellets allows for that level of control, but the pellets themselves are a pain. 

I did not test any third-party pellets and Traeger does not recommend them. You can get them online at [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/traeger-pellets/s?k=traeger+pellets){: rel=nofollow} or [Home Depot](https://fave.co/2Z5Oqc3){: rel=nofollow}. On the plus side the pellet hopper on the Ironwood is large and the only time I had to refill it was during the brisket cook (which was about 12 hours in total).

There is also still a learning curve to the Ironwood (or any other grill), but it is significantly easier to master than any other grill I have ever tested. By the time I smoked my second rack of ribs I was getting results that bested what I able to do the old-fashioned way, over charcoal, sweating through an early-August heat wave. I suppose I can't say it objectively bested me, but when all was said and done, there were leftovers of ribs I smoked over charcoal. There was nothing to be found of the ribs that came off the Ironwood. In the end, I think that's the highest praise a grill can get.