The latest Traeger wood pellet grill is here to make your baby-back and brisket dreams come true.

Joe Traeger invented the pellet grill in 1985, and his namesake wood-burning cookers have come a long way since then. With Wi-Fi connectivity, ultra-precise temperature control, and enough grill space to handle your baby-back and brisket dreams, the base Traeger Woodridge smoker quickly became our favorite, especially at an affordable $800 price.

Traeger Woodridge Setup

“I bit off more than I could chew.” That’s what I told my wife when she walked outside to see how the chicken wings were coming, and instead of a smoky grill she saw a yard sale’s worth of grill parts on the grass. She rolled her eyes and went inside to cook a frozen pizza. My football poultry dreams would have to wait another day.

I’ve put together a half-dozen grills in the past couple of years for stories like this, and this was one of the more involved builds. Traeger makes it as easy as possible, with a well-written manual (rarer than you’d think) and a diagram of the grill on a large piece of cardboard so you can lay out all the parts in their proper orientation. But the manual has multiple chapters, and each one was a project in itself.

I did it alone over one evening and the next morning, and while it was a lot, I can thankfully report that everything the manual said would happen, happened. No weird mis-aligned holes, no missing hardware, everything just worked. And the result is a seriously sturdy piece of kit that my wife eventually described as “sexy.”

Setting up the Wi-Fi connection was very simple, and after filling the very large hopper with over 20 pounds of pellets (it holds up to 24 pounds) and an initial burn-off cook to get rid of any factory residue, it was time to get to those chicken wings.

How We Tested The Traeger Woodridge

My first test was with the already infamous chicken wings. They’re one of my favorite things to cook on a pellet grill, but a gripe I have is that sometimes I can blow through a ton of pellets just to make enough wings for 2-3 people. So, by the time I’ve bought the wings and the pellets, I could’ve picked them up at a BBQ joint around the corner for the same price. But this thing is very efficient with its pellets. Every time I opened the hopper; I was surprised that it hadn’t used as much fuel as I expected. With other grills, it can seem like the opposite. The wings turned out brilliantly—rich and smoky with crispy skin.

For my second cook, I smoked bratwurst. I had some small-batch garlic-infused sauerkraut from Flanagan Farm on hand and wanted to pair it with its natural mate. For these, I used the included probe that plugs directly into the control panel so you can follow the temp on the app. I’m not a fan of superfluous apps in life, but with longer cooks I found that having the ability to monitor the grill temp from my living room was worth another square on the home screen. Speaking of temperatures, I also found that the Woodridge holds its temperature very well. I’ve been testing it in the middle of winter, so that affects heat-up times, but whenever I checked the very large and legible display, I was never more than a few degrees off the target temp, and most of the time it was exactly spot on.

Next up, I smoked three racks of pork ribs. After covering them with a dry rub, I used the 3-2-1 method, where you smoke them low (180-degrees) for three hours, then slightly higher (225-degrees) covered in tin foil for two hours, then remove the foil, baste them in sauce, and cook for another hour. Because of the dual grates, I was able to slow cook baked beans in a cast iron skillet while the ribs were smoking below. For the ribs, I needed extra real estate for hauling them on and off, so I used the pop-on (Traeger calls it Pop-and-Lock) front table. I didn’t want it deployed all the time, though, so I appreciate that it’s very easy to install and remove on the accessory rails that surround the grill on three sides.

The ribs were a hit, though I missed the Super Smoke function found on the pricier models of the Woodridge, both the Pro and the Elite. I would have enjoyed having a little more smoke flavor, but in terms of texture, they turned out incredibly well.

One thing you’ll find with a Traeger is that there are a ton of Traeger-specific recipes online for any kind of meat you want to cook. I found this very helpful because I like to have options, and Traeger has been in the market long enough to have inspired a deep online community. Not only can you find any recipe, but you can also find a Reddit thread of fifty people who’ve tried it in every possible way.

For my final test-kitchen cook, I went upscale and grilled wagyu ribeye from Vermont Wagyu, a family-owned farm that produces 100 percent Wagyu with a purebred Japanese bloodline. Grass fed and pasture-raised in Vermont, they were the finest steaks I could get my hands on. I did a reverse-sear, letting two ribeyes smoke for 45 minutes at 225-degrees, then I removed them, turned the grill up to 500-degrees (the grill’s max temperature), and finished them with a couple minutes on each side. They were decadently rich and a perfect finale dish for the grill.

Overall Thoughts On The Traeger Woodridge

When I opened the box for this grill, I needed another pellet smoker like I needed a whole in my head. Now that I’ve broken it in, I just keep thinking up reasons to cook dinner on it several times a week. If you squint your eyes, it almost looks like one of the black-barrel barbecue grills my grandfather used a half a century ago. But then you open it up and see that it’s a fully modern piece of backyard tech that you can control with your phone. Once you get through the assembly, it’s a very easy grill to use on a nightly basis, and it will have a place on my grill pad for quite some time. $799