Review: Yoder 640S

I had never dreamed of attempting to make Sinaloa-style chicken. The citrus-marinated, charbroiled chicken that came to prominence in the city of Guasave is, for my money, one of the most delicious dishes in the world. But I’ve been to enough chicken shacks to know that the process involves an intricate dance of fire, followed by indirect heat, and then a little more fire.

After two months of cooking on the Yoder YS640S pellet grill, I found myself at a Hispanic grocery store searching for sour oranges and imported oregano. Having aced ribs, burgers, and brisket, I was hungry for a challenge, and I was confident this grill could actually give me a shot at making something so complex.

Photograph: Yoder

My go-to smoker for the past decade has been a Big Green Egg, an air-tight ceramic smoker modeled on a traditional Kamado grill. The Big Green Egg is ultra-efficient at retaining heat so that the lump charcoal inside can smolder slowly over long cooks. Everything about the process demands attention to detail, with the line between success and failure determined by how you arrange the charcoal chunks and a quarter-inch difference in the crack of the air vent.

Like other automatic-feed pellet grills, the Yoder dispenses with those challenges. Pellet smokers—first popularized by Traeger and often synonymous with the brand—allow you to dump compressed wood in the hopper, twist the dial, and stick a probe into your meat. The grill doles out pellets and air as needed, then sends you a text when the work is done.

Hardcore barbecue nerds will agree: It’s not very sporting. Is barbecue a worthy pursuit if you don't have to wake up at 2 am to tend the fire and you live in constant fear of calamity? At a certain point, aren't you just shooting farmed deer?

As a smoker, the Yoder is about as domesticated as they come. The 640S employs a built-in temperature control module made by Fireboard which connects via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. There’s a dial to set the grill temperature, three buttons to start or troubleshoot, and two ports for the included temperature probes. Fireboard makes standalone temperature control products and has a well-designed and intuitive app that allows you to configure minimum and maximum temperatures which trigger alerts by text or email. Yoder was wise to tap into this system rather than try to reinvent the wheel.

I haven't used every pellet smoker on the market, but one common criticism is that they frequently end up off by 10 degrees or more. Not the Yoder, which is as reliable as my indoor oven. When you load up a rack of ribs and twist the dial to 225, the Yoder stays at 225. It doesn’t matter what type of wood you buy. Cheap pine dust pellets? 225. Fancy oak pellets? 225. Dumping rain? 225. Heat advisory in effect? You guessed it.

Photograph: Martin Cizmar

The consistent cook is a byproduct of the Yoder’s bombproof 10-gauge steel construction. It’s not quite a ceramic kamado, but at 3.2 millimeters, the steel sheets are roughly as thick as a stack of three CDs, providing excellent insulation once warmed to temperature.

It also makes the grill a beast when you need to move its hulking 335 pounds. My patio area is made with river pebbles, and I can barely budge it. Yoder does make a version mounted to a competition cart with big, knobby tires; it's probably smart to splurge on it if you intend to roll it more than a few feet.

Yoder's 640S is double the weight of the Traeger Ironwood 650, our reigning pick for the best pellet grill, which is made from 13-gauge steel and weighs just 147 pounds (while offering 650 square inches of cooking space to the Yoder’s 1,070 square inches). The Yoder also weighs more than twice as much as a large Big Green Egg.

The biggest reason to consider a Yoder over a Traeger isn’t the temperature control but the fact that it can also flame-grill a ribeye and even bake Neapolitan-style pizzas at 900-plus degrees. With the meat-smoking process dumbed down to the point that you just need to load enough pellets in the hopper (I once managed to botch this and had to restart the grill mid-cook—I’d recommend topping it off every time you open the hood to avoid that hassle), the real charm of the Yoder lies in mastering its live-fire capabilities.

The Yoder has a box of pellets offset to its left side that is fed by an auger into a firebox inside the grill. The firebox is below a removable steel plate. Removing said plate allows you to char burgers over flaming wood pellets or, it turns out, make flame-kissed Sinaloan chicken. With the optional anodized aluminum grill grates ($90) installed, I was able to get perfect char on my spatchcocked bird before moving it to the other side of the grill for an hour of baking.

Unfortunately, the temperature control is not reliable with the plate off, and you have to adjust in your head for temp differences. The instruction manual notes that when cooking directly with the grill set to 350 degrees, it is actually at 425 degrees. At 425 degrees, it’s actually at 625 degrees. It would've been smarter to allow the user to choose which setup they’re using and then adjust the temperature on the display to be accurate on the “direct” setting.

Photograph: Martin Cizmar

My favorite of all the Yoder 640S features is the ability to turn it into a pizza oven. This requires a $500 attachment, but anyone who has ever fought with a pellet-powered Ooni will understand the appeal. I’ve owned various Ooni ovens for the past three years and use them nearly every Sunday, Midwestern polar vortex or tornado watch be damned. I prefer the flame-kissed crusts from the pellet-fueled Fyra over the propane models, but pellets can be tricky, and flame-outs have ruined my evening. Often, while fiddling with my second or third paraffin fire starter of the night, I’ve dreamed of a pizza oven that works like an automatic pellet smoker. The Yoder is, as best I can tell, the first one to really make this dream work right.

The pizza oven attachment sits under the smoker’s hood atop the firebox. The sheet is a diffuser and has holes of increasing size as you move away from the fire so that the section farthest from the flame gets more exposure. The design is supposed to provide a consistent temperature along the oven’s floor, and it works well, with the farthest corners of the oven still cresting 650 degrees.

When you crank the Yoder up to its highest setting, the flames roll over the left side of the pizza oven attachment, imparting char. Using an instant-read thermometer, I measured the temperature inside at 1,000 degrees. The floor of the oven is what Yoder describes as a proprietary stone blend, and it offers impressive temperature consistency and crusts that are crispier than any I’ve had from an Ooni. The convenience is the best feature though, as you can fill your grill with pellets, push one button, and come back 15 minutes later to a roaring wood-fired pizza oven.

Getting a roaring fire going is just the first step in making a good Neapolitan-style pizza. With the Yoder, I’m free to obsess over the milk fat content of the mozzarella. Or to dig into my Diana Kennedy cookbooks for more marinated Mexican chicken recipes. What’s the best brand of achiote paste, anyway?

Traeger is synonymous with the auto-feed pellet grill for a reason, and while the Yoder can hold temperatures more consistently than competitors, it’s probably not worth the extra cash or the challenges of moving around an object that weighs more than the average refrigerator. But if you’re a sucker for overbuilt gear or an occasional smoker who enjoys the simplicity of an auto-feed pellet smoker and would like to flame-broil steaks and make pizzas on the same grill, the Yoder 640S is unmatched.