2022’s Best Kamado Grill Accessories That You Need

Making sure your grill (any kind of grill) is covered is important to keep it protected from the elements, and a kamado grill’s ceramic construction is no exception to that, being weathered by the elements just as much, if in different ways, as a steel grill.

You might think one grill cover is as good as another, and in some ways you’re not wrong. Pretty much any cover will do the job if it’s big enough…for a time.

What you’re buying when you buy a better grill cover is longevity more than any nebulous measures of “quality”.

In this case the longevity comes from the very dense 600 D fabrics, which are tightly woven, very water resistant, and built to last. It’s also quite large and covers a wide variety of kamado grills, essentially everything on the market besides the Kamado Joe Big Joe (which is a bit too large for most covers). There’s at least one other grill cover on the market I think is “better” than this…but it’s also 3 times the price, and I don’t think it’s anywhere near 3 times better, making this a great buy.

When smoking, there are a few methods to making sure your meat comes out good. Most involve monitoring the meat the old fashioned way: sticking around it or checking it regularly for the whole cooking time.

That’s all fine and dandy, but sometimes you just don’t have the time for all that tender love and care, or just want to up your game with a more science rather than experience based approach to your cooking.

Enter the smoker temperature controller, a tool that automatically regulates the heat of your smoker by clamping down on oxygen when it gets too hot, and opens up when it gets to cool, reducing fluctuations in temperature over time that can make cooking times vary so much.

Flame Boss 500 in particular is great, with all the amenities. It has wifi controls and is usable up to a fair distance away, with easy to use controls and a huge variety of presets available for smoking just about anything. It’s compatible to Kamado grills, Big Green Egg products and many more brands.

It’s a bit pricey, but well worth it, and thankfully you don’t even pay the “kamado tax” for this one; it’s the same price as the regular steel smoker variant.

We have the complete list for automatic temperature controller here.

Getting a fire started in a charcoal or wood grill can be a huge pain. Thankfully, there’s handy gadgets like this to expedite the process, taking down the time it would take to fiddle with a lighter.

There’s a few different styles of fire starter. The most common is a raw electric heating element (similar to what you’d find in an oven), which you bury in the coals or wood and let it heat up to ignite them.

Those work good, but I think this style is a little neater. Rather than requiring direct contact with the coals, which can be a bit dicey for your fingers, especially with shorter options (more so than using a lighter or match, in my opinion) this one fires a very hot (1100 degrees Fahrenheit) stream of air at whatever you aim it at, igniting it in under 60 seconds from a safe distance.

Despite how fancy that sounds, it’s still pretty simple: plug it in, point, and click the power switch. Once the fire is lit, let go of the switch and it shuts off, then cools down very quickly (within a few seconds) to be safe to the touch.

On top of all that it’s easy to store, with a nice storage hook that you can wrap the cable around and hang anywhere you want, which also doubles as a bottle opener. For the price (slightly more expensive than the more minimalist options, but not much) it is a huge time and effort saver on stubborn coals or wood, without introducing chemical lighter fluids into the mix.

If you plan to do a lot of smoking, a good chimney is a must.

This is one of the places where kamado style grills tend to fall short of the more common steel grills, with flimsier, more open, or just in general inferior chimney caps compared to a regular grill.

That’s where replacements like this come in, giving you a great installable alternative to the standard chimney cap the grill comes with.

This one in particular from Smokeware is made for Kamado Joe grills, and is compatible with a  wide variety of grills, but if it doesn’t fit your specific grill, there are others pretty much identical to it out there for you.

This is a great example of what to look for though if you need to search further. It’s made of solid stainless steel, making it very sturdy and long lasting (particularly if you toss a good grill cover over your kamado grill to keep it safe).

The vents on this are top notch, with 3 vents you can control via the slide handle, which is responsive but stays in place where you need it, making it easy to use.

Compared to what the grills usually come with, it’s like night and day for your smoking ability, giving you vastly improved control and increasing the longevity of your grill quite a bit by helping to keep moisture out of it when it’s not in use.

As mentioned before, starting a fire can be a bit of a pain. There are quite a few ways to make it easier on yourself. Above, I went over a reusable electric fire starter. They’re quite good, but can be a bit pricey, especially if you don’t grill or smoke all that often.

Instead, having an all natural disposable alternative is a nice way to make things easier on yourself and get things burning with a minimum of effort.

These come in a few different varieties (the most simple of which can be paper), but are always going to be some kind of fast burning material that can help the fire catch to the more stubborn charcoals or woods you’re using.

In this case, you get some nice pine wood shavings bound in a bit of food grade wax. It burns for a solid 8 to 10 minutes, giving you plenty of time for the wood or charcoal itself to catch.

The pine wood isn’t the best wood for cooking usually, but as a starter it’s perfect, catching fire quickly and giving off a nice pine smell, without actually flavoring the food anyway.

It always pays to remember that a grill can be used for more than just grilling. No matter the trappings you’ve come to associate with a grill, the fact of the matter is it’s still a tightly enclosed space with a lot of heat, much like the home appliances you’re familiar with.

A grill can mimic many or all of the functions a specific kind of other cooking machine can, in this case an oven. A pizza oven, in fact.

All grills can do this, but kamado grills do it especially well. All you really need to do to turn your Big Green Egg or similar kamado style grill into a lean, mean, pizza cooking machine is to get yourself a suitably sized pizza stone for crispy crust and get to work!

This particular pizza stone by Cast Elegance is a great example of what to look for. It’s satisfyingly thick, with a good size (choice of 14” and 16” rounds, depending on the size of your kamado grill) and very solid Thermarite construction; a variant of the standard cordierite material most pizza stones are made of with extra heat tempering to make it resistant to heat shock.

It’s very difficult to do better than this simple but effective pizza stone, and I’d only recommend against getting it if your kamado grill doesn’t fit either of these sizes for whatever reason.

In keeping with our previous theme of using your grill to do the job that might traditionally fall to other tools, why not use your grill as a griddle?

Having a griddle pan for your grill is an astounding upgrade to its versatility that you might not think about initially. Adding a griddle to it like this is the difference between a grill being your favorite cooking tool and being your ONLY cooking tool.

Slapping this bad boy on your grill opens a world of possibilities, foods that were otherwise tedious become a breeze. Eggs? Flaky fish? Pancakes? The sky’s the limit.

This particular style of griddle pan is super great for a few reasons. First is the reversible nature making it even more versatile overall, the ridges giving you a nice place to sear things and give them those grill marks without losing any juices, and the flat side being perfect for most other things.

But the half moon design is the big kicker here. Since it only takes up half your grill surface, you can mix and match what you do at any given time. Grill a steak on one side, and fry some vegetables up on the other, for instance.

This specific model is really good overall, and you can find ones like it for most of the major brands with different material like cast iron out there.

Ending us off is something for one of everybody’s least favorite chores: cleaning the grill.

The stuck on gunk that clings to a grill when you’re done cooking is one of the worst parts about grilling as a cooking method. There are a ton of tools out there for cleaning off grills, griddles, and similar cooking devices; scrapers, brushes, spongey things, cleaning products, etc.

But one of the more overlooked options is this right here: scrape a rock on it.

Specifically grillstone, which is basically just a kind of pumice, but one people have found for a long time to be perfect for cleaning off a grill.

The beauty of grill blocks like this is that they’re fast and easy “first pass” cleaning items, instantly scrubbing off the worst gunk so that you can get a good clean shine after you’re done.

They’re durable, reusable, need nothing at all to get you started (no water or anything is needed or even recommended), and don’t even need a handle.

Try them, especially on your griddle and pizza stone attachments (gently), you might be amazed at how much more effective a square rock is at cleaning than all your other fancy tools. In need of more cleaning products? We have the latest grill cleaner spray and grill brushes too.

All of these products are great examples of their kind, and the best I can find overall, with some having the only drawback of lack of compatibility with certain brands or sizes of grill.

If you use these as a starting point for finding something similar for your own grill, they all make very good “best case” references for their respective product types.