Ashley Monroe

A backyard pizza oven changes what a weeknight pizza can be. An indoor oven tops out around 500 degrees and needs an hour to bring a stone to temperature, so the crust stays pale and chewy. A propane oven gets a cordierite deck to 900 degrees in fifteen minutes and bakes a leopard-spotted pie in … Read more

Short answer: the Gozney Roccbox is the best outdoor pizza oven for beginners, because gas power removes the one thing that trips up most first-time owners, which is managing a live fire. It reaches 950°F, cooks a 12-inch pizza in about 60 seconds, holds heat well enough to bake pie after pie without a long … Read more

Jerky is the one cook where a smoker stops being a barbecue tool and starts being a drying cabinet. You need a long, boring, steady hold somewhere between 140F and 170F, enough flat rack area to lay thin strips down without touching, and a fan and hopper that will not cycle the temperature every twenty … Read more

A pellet smoker is built to hold 225°F for twelve hours without blinking. That same steady, indirect heat is exactly what makes most of them bad at the four-minute blast a steak needs. Buyers searching for the best pellet smokers with sear zones usually discover the gap the hard way, standing over a grill that … Read more

Game day is the one cook where the grill is an afterthought and the food is the point. You show up, you plug in, you set a temperature, and three hours later a rack of ribs is falling off the bone while your group is still tailgating. The problem is that most grills sold for … Read more

A WiFi pellet grill is a wood-pellet smoker or grill with a built-in radio and a companion phone app that streams pit temperature, meat-probe readings and hopper status to your phone, and in most cases lets you change the set temperature without walking out to the yard. That is the whole pitch, and it is … Read more

The best pellet smokers for beginners are the Z GRILLS ZPG-450A2, the Pit Boss 440 Mahogany and the Traeger Ranger, in that order. The ZPG-450A2 wins because it pairs a real PID V3.0 controller with 459 square inches of cooking space and the deepest owner-review base of any grill we examined, while the Pit Boss … Read more

Almost every first-time seed sower loses a tray to the same problem, and it is not the seed. It is the watering. You pour water across the cells, one corner ends up waterlogged, another stays bone dry, and somewhere in between a few seedlings collapse at the base with damping-off. A self-watering seed starting system … Read more

An indoor herb garden sounds simple: a small box of water, a light, and a handful of pods that turn into fresh basil in a few weeks. My kitchen counter is the reason I kept ending up with dried, flavorless herbs from the grocery store, so I ran ten of the best indoor herb garden … Read more

The best seedling grow light shelves for garages combine a tiered metal rack with full-spectrum LED strip or bar fixtures mounted under each shelf, so you can hang lights a few inches above seed trays and raise them as plants grow. The rack gives you vertical space, the lights fix the intensity and distance problems … Read more