Outdoor Kitchen Cooking Equipment: Grills, Griddles, Smokers, and Pizza Ovens

The pairing that covers the widest range of real cooking is a gas grill plus a griddle. Gas handles weeknights and anything on grates; the griddle handles breakfast, onions, smash burgers, and volume cooking for a crowd — which is most of what people actually do outdoors beyond steaks.

The pairing people buy but under-use is gas plus a side burner. See components for why.

Two families are missing from that table because they sit slightly outside the built-in world, and both deserve consideration. Electric grills are the only realistic option on many balconies and in some rental agreements and condominium rules, where open flame is prohibited outright; modern ones cook considerably better than their reputation suggests, though they will not match gas or charcoal for searing. Portable and tabletop cookers — a small gas grill, a compact pizza oven, a hibachi — are worth keeping even if you build a full kitchen, because they travel, and because they let you cook somewhere else in the garden when you feel like it.

Neither belongs in a built-in cutout, which is exactly why they are easy to overlook when planning an island. Plan a place to store them rather than assuming the built-in equipment replaces them.

Cooking equipment is where cutout, clearance, and structure requirements enter the design, and they differ sharply by family.

Gas grills drop into a cutout that is typically 21 to 24 inches deep and needs 9 to 13 inches of clear space below. Nothing in your frame may cross that envelope. If any part of the enclosure is combustible you need the manufacturer's insulated jacket.

Kamados are heavy — often 150 to 250 pounds before charcoal — and deep. They need a purpose-built table or a reinforced bay, and their ceramic exterior has its own clearance requirements that differ from a metal grill's.

Pellet smokers need electrical power, which surprises people. A pellet grill in a built-in bay needs a GFCI-protected receptacle within reach, and the hopper needs access for loading.

Pizza ovens are governed by mouth height rather than counter height, and wood-fired versions need a properly terminated flue if they sit under any cover.

Detail: grill cutout dimensions and pizza oven dimensions.

One demand that applies across every family and is routinely underestimated: access for service and replacement. Grills, smokers, and ovens are the components most likely to be replaced during the life of the island, and a bay built so tightly that the appliance cannot be lifted out without demolishing masonry turns a straightforward swap into a construction project. Leave a route out. It costs nothing at build time and it is the difference between a two-hour replacement and a two-thousand-dollar one.

The same logic applies to gas connections. A shut-off valve that is accessible without dismantling anything, and a connection you can reach, means service and replacement stay simple. Burying the connection behind fixed panels is a decision that looks tidy on day one and is regretted at the first repair.

Natural gas means never running out, and it is the right answer if a line can reach the island. It requires a licensed connection and a permit, and it fixes the grill in place permanently.

Propane is flexible and needs no trench, but the cylinder has to live somewhere ventilated and be replaceable. Requirements for LP-gas appliance installation are set out in NFPA 58, and enclosures must be vented low because propane is heavier than air and collects at the bottom.

Charcoal and wood need dry storage nearby and an ash disposal plan that is not a plastic bin.

Pellets need dry storage above all — damp pellets swell, jam the auger, and are the most common cause of a pellet grill failing to start.

One point that decides more builds than it should: converting a grill between natural gas and propane is sometimes possible with a manufacturer kit and sometimes not, and the cutout depth occasionally differs between the two variants. Decide fuel before you buy the grill, not after.

A note on fuel quantity that catches people out with propane. A standard 20-pound cylinder runs a mid-size gas grill for roughly eighteen to twenty hours of cooking, which sounds ample and translates to running out mid-cook perhaps twice a season for a regular griller. The two practical answers are keeping a full spare cylinder and fitting a gauge, or running natural gas if a line can reach. Almost nobody regrets the spare cylinder; a great many people have discovered the problem with steaks already on the grates.

Most people need one primary cooker and, at most, one secondary. Three built-in cooking appliances in a residential outdoor kitchen is nearly always one more than gets used.

A useful test before adding a second cooker: how many times in the last year did you cook two different things outdoors simultaneously? If the answer is under five, the second appliance is buying you convenience on five occasions at a cost of a thousand dollars and eighteen inches of counter — and that eighteen inches of counter would have been used every single cook.

The exception is genuinely different cooking modes: a gas grill plus a pellet smoker is two appliances doing genuinely different jobs, and people who smoke regularly do use both. A gas grill plus a second gas grill with a side burner is not.

The full index of grill and cooking guides follows. For the structure they mount into see build guides, for sizing see dimensions, and for everything else start at the homepage.

There is one more consideration that argues for fewer appliances rather than more, and it is maintenance. Every cooking appliance outdoors needs cleaning, covering, and winterising, and each one added is another set of grates to scrub, another cover to fit, and another gas or electrical connection to check. People who own three built-in cookers frequently report that two of them are dirty, because maintenance effort scales with appliance count while enthusiasm does not.

If in doubt, buy one very good appliance rather than two adequate ones. A high-quality grill used four hundred times is a better purchase than two mid-range appliances used two hundred times each, and it occupies less of the counter run that you will use on every single cook.

A last point about sequencing that saves money: buy the cooking equipment before building the island, not after. Everything in this section — cutout dimensions, clearance requirements, weight, whether it needs power, whether the fuel is natural gas or propane — is a property of the specific model you end up with. Designing an island around a category and then choosing a model within it is how people discover that their chosen grill needs an inch more depth than the frame provides.

Having the appliance physically on site while the structure is built costs you some storage space for a few weeks and removes the entire category of fitment error. It is the cheapest insurance available anywhere in an outdoor kitchen project, and it is the single recommendation most consistently ignored.