Review: Spark One

Charcoal grilling is probably the oldest method of cooking on earth, old enough that its use predates recorded history. This is worth bearing in mind when a company says it's innovating on charcoal grilling. Are you really sure no one has tried this at some point in the last 20,000 years?

That's not exactly what Spark claims, but it's close. The company's goal with its Spark One grill is to bring together the flavor of charcoal with the ease of propane grills. 

Like any propane grill you've ever used, the Spark One can be started by turning a knob. Like any charcoal grill you've ever used, it cooks your food with charcoal. On paper, the Spark One delivers a solution to the exact problem it set out to solve. But was it a problem in the first place?

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

Food cooked over charcoal has a distinctive taste. This is the Spark One's appeal: that great charcoal flavor but with the convenience of a gas grill.

Before I dive into how the Spark delivers on this claim, it's important to understand that exactly how food acquires that distinctive charcoal flavor is influenced by everything from smoke (the specific aromas given off by burning wood that end up in the food) to how, when, and where any Maillard reaction occurs. There are many variables at play when grilling over wood or charcoal: the kind of wood, the smoke, the heat, and more.

Combining these variables is as much art as science and is a part of the fun of cooking over burning wood or charcoal. At least to some of us. Plenty of other people—understandably—just want to get a tasty grilled dinner on the table. If you fall into the latter category, the Spark is for you.

This is a no-fuss, flip-a-switch-and-go charcoal grill that imparts, in my testing anyway, about 80 percent of the flavor you'd get from a traditional charcoal grill. If you love the Pareto principle, the Spark is worth considering, because it really does give you 80 percent of the results with 20 percent of the effort. Really, probably less than 20 percent of the effort.

The midcentury-modern-inspired design looks great. The clean lines and rounded corners make other grills look bulky and awkward. The bamboo cutting board and working area provide ample food-prepping space, more than most grills I've tested.

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

It plugs into an ordinary three-prong socket and uses electricity to automatically light your Briq, as Spark calls its proprietary charcoal, and to operate fans that control the temperature of the grill. It's an ingenious system, and it worked almost flawlessly in my testing.

If you can turn on an oven, you can grill with the Spark. Turn it on, wait for it to heat up to your desired temperature, and cook. It doesn't get much simpler than that. The Spark One also has an app that connects via Bluetooth. You can use it to adjust and monitor the temperature through your iOS or Android device.

There are some hot spots. The left-rear side of the grill was consistently hotter in temperature-gun readings and cooked noticeably faster. That's not unusual though, every grill I've ever tried has hot spots. What's unusual about the Spark One is how you set up the two-zone system.

Two-zone cooking refers to cooking with both direct and indirect heat. It's a cornerstone of great grilling, and it's simple to do with most charcoal grills: move the charcoal to one side. That side will be much hotter and becomes your direct cooking zone, and the other side is your indirect cooking zone.

Photograph: Spark

With the Spark One, it's a little more complicated. You have to remove the heat diffuser from the center. Then directly above the Briq is the direct heat, while all around it is the indirect cooking areas. It works, but it's awkward to move things around when grilling since you're not going from one side to the other, but around in a circle. It's not a deal-breaker, but it will take some practice.

The only real problem with the Spark grill is the proprietary charcoal. It's not cheap, about $5 a Briq, and one Briq is one cook. Well, ideally. If you're cooking for two people, say grilling up some burgers quick, you'll use significantly less than a full Briq. There's no way to stop the rest from burning up though, so you end up using a whole thing.

If, on the other hand, you're cooking a whole chicken and you need just a few more minutes … well, you better start your oven, because there's no way to throw a couple more Briqs on like you would in a typical charcoal grill.

Briq options are limited as well. The only ones available now are for high-heat cooking. The Spark really excels from about 450 degrees to 850 degrees, with 500 being the sweet spot in my testing. If you want to do a slow cook, say ribs or brisket, you'll need Spark's low-and-slow Briq, which I wasn't able to test. (*Update April 08: the low-and-slow Briq is now available*)

That gets to the heart of the problem with proprietary charcoal—availability. You can order Briqs online from Spark, but if the company goes out of business, you've got a $900, oversized paperweight. That's technically not true, as you can cook with regular charcoal, but everything great about the Spark would stop being great. The precision temperature control is gone, it's a pain to light, and in the end, it'll cook no better than a $20 grill from a big box store. You need the Briqs.

Therein lies the rub: expensive Briqs with limited cooking options. If you can live with that, the rest of the Spark One is great, and it really does deliver on its promise of charcoal grilling made simple.