Weber Q; are they worth it for camping?
We picked up a Baby Q Weber a couple of years ago, for the purposes of giving us more options when camping, and its been one of the best accessories we’ve bought.
Yes, they are seriously expensive, and they take up a lot of room, but it gives you so many extra options and tasty food that it now lives in our camper trailer full time, and gets used at least a couple of times a week.
Next time you visit a caravan park, and you walk around, take a look at how many Webers and other types of BBQ’s you see in use. I’ve done it a couple of times, and in some locations around 80% of campers and caravan owners have a Weber or Ziggy, or other BBQ out and in use.
What ever you can cook at home in the oven, you can do in the weber, and that hugely improves your options.
If you want a full on roast, or pizza, or the best tasting meat and vegetables you can get, a Weber is an amazing upgrade.
If you want to see more Camp Cooking, we’ve got a heap of posts to see.
Weber Models for Camping
For camping, most people will either buy the Q1000, or the Q1200. These are both Baby Weber Q’s, and are almost identical, except for the Q1200 having a higher lid, and an inbuilt temperature thermocouple in the lid.
You can only buy the Q1200 from registered Weber distributors, and the Q1000’s can only be purchased from other more general stores, like BCF, Retravision and so forth.
Our folks have the family weber (Q2000), which they got second hand not knowing it was the larger model, and it works fine too. Ironically, they are actually not as tall, and fit into the tunnel boot of their caravan easily.
You’ll find that the Baby Q is often too tall to fit into a regular tunnel boot, which means you have to remove the lid, or cut the feet down. Both options work, or you could get a Ziggy that is much smaller in height!
How much do they cost?
Webers are not cheap, and I’m sure you pay for the brand name. That said, they have some of the best customer service in the world, and will happily send you new parts for anything that has failed in, and even outside of warranty.
We paid about $600 for our Weber, with a number of accessories including a 3 metre gas bayonet fitting, flat plate for cooking, pizza stone (which we’ve since broken), wire brush for cleaning, trivet and trays and a few other bits and pieces.
I must admit I felt the eyes water a bit as I departed with the docket in hand, but looking back I feel its probably been worth it.
What accessories are worth buying?
You can spend a lot of money on accessories for the Weber, and they aren’t always necessary depending on how you are going to use it. Also, you can buy non genuine accessories for a fraction of the price, and the quality is not always significantly worse.
You need the trivet, and get one of their aluminium trays and drill out a normal baking tray in the same hole style, and you are set for life.
We have a half flat plate for cooking breakfast, but to be honest never both swapping it out and just avoid cooking eggs on the Weber.
We had (and broke) a pizza stone and two pizza plates, and we bought a genuine Weber brush for cleaning the BBQ, which has been invaluable.
You can make camp oven pizza, but its so much easier in the Weber!
How do you travel with them?
If you stick to the bitumen roads, you’d get away with leaving the grills in place. For us, we always remove them as the chances of them picking up and falling back down on the burner tube is very high, which would wreck the unit.
It’s worth noting that you can get a single piece grill as a replacement, which would make it impossible to fall down and do damage, and some people have gone this way.
We simply unclip our gas fitting, coil it up, take the grills out and put them in an old neoprene laptop bag with some cardboard between them and put the weber in its bag.
Without the grills in they are seriously light, and despite taking up a fair chunk of room they are easy enough to travel with.
What’s our favourite things to cook?
Anything that you do in the weber seems to taste better than doing at home in a frying pan, or in the oven. I don’t know what it is, but you can buy and eat the cheapest sausages around and they will actually taste amazing.
We love cooking steak, sausages, zucchini slices, sweet potato, skewers and bruschetta on the grill, and with the trivet we often cook various roasts, and pizzas.
Using the flat plate, we do occasionally cook bacon and eggs, or fish, but these days it rarely comes out.
We are still very much experimenting with the Weber despite having it for more than a year though, and always love trying out new recipes.
Weber or Ziggy
I’m going to be diplomatic here, and say that both products are extremely popular, and well loved by their respective owners.
One is a better backed brand, and likely better quality, but the Ziggy has some benefits over the Weber, and at the end of the day if it cooks the food you want well, does it really matter?
What do you use? What do you like cooking on it?
