10 Best Grill Tools and Accessories of 2025

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This charcoal basket lets you easily smoke large cuts and sear steaks and veggies on a kettle grill.

The popularity of the Weber kettle grill has invited a lot of third-party innovations—essentially, ways to make your grill even more versatile. One such item—the SnS Grills Slow ’n Sear Deluxe—is hardly a necessity, but we can see why it’s a favorite among charcoal enthusiasts: It turns any 22-inch kettle grill into a more capable and multipurpose smoker, and it makes indirect cooking and high-heat searing simple.

This half-moon charcoal basket, which has a reservoir that holds 1 quart of water, fits flush against the side of the grill, so it’s easily accessible from the hinged cooking grate. You can find other, less expensive charcoal baskets, but none we researched offered the range of functionality of the Slow ’n Sear Deluxe.

We tested the Slow ’n Sear Deluxe several ways. First, we tried a fast method for baby back ribs. We filled the basket with hot coals, topped it with peach-wood chunks, and filled the reservoir with water. During the three-hour cook, we added hot coals once around the halfway mark to maintain a temperature of roughly 325 °F. The resulting baby back ribs were smoky, juicy, and tender.

For the second test, we tried a low-and-slow method on St. Louis–style ribs. Instead of filling the Slow ’n Sear Deluxe with hot coals, we lit a dozen briquets on one end of the basket. Once they were ashed over, we filled the rest of the basket with unlit coals, topped it with peach-wood chunks, and added water to the reservoir. Throughout cooking, the coals and wood smoldered like a cigar, from one end to the other. After four hours at 275 °F, the St. Louis ribs were juicy, with delicious, lightly charred bits on the ends.

Then we turned to high-heat cooking—the “sear” part of the Slow ’n Sear Deluxe. We charred tomatoes and onions directly over freshly lit, red-hot coals and put a foil pack of garlic and oil off to the side in the indirect zone. After charring, we moved the vegetables to a metal sizzle plate in the indirect zone to cook with the grill covered for 20 minutes. We then whirred everything in a blender with a large handful of cilantro and salt to taste. The result was some of the best salsa we’ve ever made.

The Slow ’n Sear basket is also good for reverse searing. Ideal for thick steaks, this method involves cooking the meat with indirect heat until the internal temperature is 15 degrees below your target and then searing directly over the hot coals to get a crisp crust.

Less-expensive, less-controllable, and less-versatile options, such as Weber’s plain grill baskets, exist—heck, as Sam said, you can just “use three bricks” to corral the coals if you’re doing only indirect cooking (they cost about 60¢ apiece). But the Slow ’n Sear Deluxe offers deft heat control from the lowest to the highest temperatures, the utility of a water reservoir, lengthy set-it-and-forget-it cook times on a single load of coal, and dead-simple setup and cleanup. If you’re a regular griller or smoker or plan to be one, these qualities may justify the expense.