How to choose a charcoal skewer grill

The most common buying mistake is picking a grill by how it looks and discovering later that it holds about half of what you actually cook.

Work out the honest number first. Not the biggest party you have ever thrown, and not the two of you on a Tuesday. The number you cook for on a normal weekend when people come over. Buy for that, and accept that the occasional larger event means running two rounds.

As a rough guide, a sixteen skewer rack covers a family and a couple of guests. Twenty four is where most households land. Thirty two is for people who feed a crowd often enough that batching would annoy them.

Every charcoal skewer grill puts a row of skewers over coals. The difference between them is what happens when that row needs turning, and this is where most of the frustration in skewer cooking lives.

Notched trough, turned individually

The common design. Skewers rest in notches and you turn each one by hand. It works perfectly well up to about eight skewers. Past that, the time it takes to work down the row becomes a real fraction of the cooking time, and the first skewer is meaningfully further along than the last.

Geared rack, turned together

The skewers link to a shared rack, and one handle turns the whole row as a unit. Every skewer changes face at the same moment. This is what the frames on this site do, and it is the reason a thirty two skewer load is practical rather than chaotic.

Motorised

A motor turns continuously at a fixed speed. Good for large joints on a spit, where the cook is long and slow. Less useful for small skewers, where you want to decide when to turn based on the colour rather than have it happen on a timer. It also puts an electrical part into a wet outdoor environment.

A charcoal fire cannot be turned down. The only real controls you have are how much fuel you light, how it is banked, and how far the food sits from it.

A grill with a fixed grate gives you the first two. A grill with an adjustable charcoal tray gives you the third, and it is the one you reach for most often mid cook: coals up for a hard sear, coals down when a marinade starts to catch.

Without it, your only recovery when something is colouring too fast is to move it, and on a full grate there is nowhere to move it to.

Two details decide what you can actually cook.

• Flat or round. Round skewers let minced meat spin loose the moment you turn them, which makes adana, kafta and any pressed mince a losing battle. Cubed meat does not care. If minced kebabs are your main event, confirm the skewer profile before you buy anything, from us or anyone else.
• Material and length. Metal skewers on a wide frame, because the bare ends sit over heat rather than overhanging into cool air the way they do on a narrow traditional trough.

An open frame moves more air through the coals, keeps them lively, and is easier to reach into and clean out. An enclosed body holds heat where the food is and shrugs off wind.

If your cooking spot is sheltered, take the open frame. If you are on an exposed block, a rooftop, or anywhere near the coast where the afternoon breeze is a fixture, the enclosed body will save you fuel and stop one end of the row cooking slower than the other.