Brisk It Origin 940 Review: Does BBQ Need A.I.?

Artificial Intelligence has been taking over in many aspects of our lives, and it's found our way into the outdoor cooking space. Today we're putting the Brisk It Origin 940 pellet grill under the microscope to see if AI knows anything about how to cook barbecue.

I'm David Gafford, and here at The Barbecue Lab we test over 70 different outdoor cooking appliances every year. In this article, we're going to ask AI to help us cook Beef Ribs Texas style and some Chicken Satay skewers to test the low and slow and high heat grilling capabilities of this grill.

What Is The Brisk It Origin 940?

Brisk It originally launched with the Origin 580 grill, and later followed with the Origin 940 model. You might be asking, "What does the 940 or the 580 mean?" The number included in the grill name is the square cooking inches available in main cooking area of grill.

How does the AI function work?

Testing Vera AI: Beef Ribs

If you click on the fire icon in the app, you get the grill control screen where you find an orange circle on the far right hand side. When you hold down the microphone button on the app, you can speak directly into the phone and tell it what you want to cook. For our first cook, we used this prompt to get a recipe for Beef Ribs:

"I have 4.4 pounds of beef plate ribs that I would like to smoke for dinner and eat at 5:30pm. It's 9:32am, and I would like to do this in a "Texas Style" of beef ribs. Can you help me with a recipe please?"

Here are a few screenshots of the recipe that we were given. 

We followed the recipe by trimming some of the fat from the ribs and seasoning both sides with kosher salt and 16 mesh black pepper.

At this point, the app asked us to send the program to the grill, and with the push of a button, the app loaded the recipe into the Origin 940. The program controlled the grill's temperature and monitored the status of the meat using the included internal temperature probe. There was no cooking time given, as the grill is going to monitor the meat to determine how the cook is going and adjust from there.

At 3:51pm, we received a notification that the meat had reached the temperature to move on to phase 2 of the cooking process. We wrapped the ribs in peach butcher paper as instructed, put the probe back into the meat and placed it back on the grill to finish cooking.

The grill automatically increased the temperature to 250 degrees during this step, and after a little over an hour, our beef ribs were ready for a brief rest before dinner was served. If you want to see my reaction to the ribs, be sure to check out the video below to catch the taste test.

Testing Vera AI: Sweet & Spicy Chicken Satay

For a high heat recipe, I wanted to make some chicken satay using Gochujang as a primary ingredient in the marinade. After topping off the pellet hopper, here's the instruction that I gave Vera:

"I would like to make some chicken satay skewers by marinating the chicken using Gochujang as the primary ingredient. I would like the recipe to be both sweet and spicy, so balance out the spice with sweetness please."

Here are some screenshots of the recipe that came back from the app.

I mixed the gochujang, honey, soy sauce, garlic and ginger in a bowl, and marinated the chicken for a little over an hour to let the flavors develop. My son Ethan helped me get the chicken strips on metal kebab skewers, and we sent the recipe to the grill.

The Origin 940 went through the startup process and increased the temperature to 375 degrees as a part of the program. If you said that this was a smart grill, you would be right.

There's plenty of cooking space on the main grate, and I didn't have any trouble fitting all 10 skewers in the grill. It only took about 15 minutes to grill the chicken and hit our target internal temperature of 165°F.

I had a group of friends over at the house when these came off the grill, and they were all gone in about 5 minutes with great reviews from everyone. We had multiple people ask for the recipe, and when I told them it was generated by AI, it sparked a lengthy discussion about AI in bbq.

Our Brisk It Origin 940 Review Video

Does AI Belong In BBQ?

This is the question that so many friends and family have been asking me as I test this grill.

Barbecue is known as the hobby where you sit out by the grill and learn the craft by sitting with experienced pitmasters and gleaning their wisdom.

What if you don't know an experienced pitmaster? If you're like me and live in an area where there isn't a pit master on every corner, then you're left to searching YouTube and reading articles to figure things out.

The Vera AI really is training wheels for your smoker as you're getting started.

If this existed when I got into the hobby, I would have easily shaved years off my learning journey and avoided some inedible meals.

Is this your first grill? Is a smart grill like the Brisk It Origin right for you? That's something only you can decide, but if you want a digital mentor that's compiling all of the prevailing thoughts in bbq right into your grill app, then the Brisk it origin 940 is certainly worth a good hard look.

Pellet Grill vs. Gas Grills

If you're considering the move from a gas grill to a pellet grill, here are a few things to consider:

• pellet grills are wood pellet fired; gas grills use propane

• pellet grills have a small burn cup that contains the fire; gas grills use multiple burners across the entire main grate

• pellet grills are generally better smokers than they are high heat grills. Gas grills are generally better high heat grills and don't have smoking capabilities

• Gas grills aren't usually a smart grill.

• Pellet grills won't have fire lapping up underneath the grate when you grill. Heat is applied more like an oven and less like a gas grill in pellet grills.

Notable Features In The Brisk It Origin 940

Cooking Temperatures

The Brisk It Origin has a low temperature setting of 165° Fahrenheit for low and slow cooking. On the high end, the top setting is 500° Fahrenheit for grilling at higher temperatures.

Cooking Space

There are two levels of cooking grates on the Brisk It 940 grill. The main grate has a width of 30 inches and a depth of 19.75 inches. There is an upper rack that comes in two pieces. Each piece is 29 inches wide by 6 inches deep, and when both are used the depth of the upper rack is 12 inches.

Dimensions

The interaction height of the cooking surface is 35.5 inches above the ground. The overall width is 55.5 inches and the grill is 45.5 inches tall. For those of you concerned with depth, the deepest part of the grill is the rear wheels that measure 27 inches deep.

Smart Grill

To qualify any grill as a smart grill, it has to be able to do some things on its own. On this pellet grill, you could ask for a pulled pork recipe using the app and it would create one for you. You could also send that pulled pork recipe to the grill and it would execute the program for you by changing temperatures and settings as needed. Just one of these two things would make this pellet grill a smart grill, so no issues here.

Who is this for?

My personal thought is that the Brisk It smart grill is designed for people just starting their barbecue journey. For someone just getting into the BBQ hobby, having an AI there to answer your questions is incredibly valuable.

For experienced pit masters, the smart smoker likely isn't going to tell you anything that you don't already know. It will help you confirm those cooking temperatures that you've probably already locked away in the back of your mind. It will probably give you a few new ingredients to try if you're stuck in a single way of doing things for a particular cut of meat. There's value here, but it's minimized if you already come to it with a wealth of experience.