About
How we research, and what we don’t do
Flame & Feast covers outdoor cooking gear in the $400–$2,500 range — pizza ovens, smokers, grills, fuel. This page explains exactly how we arrive at a recommendation, so you can judge how much weight to give it.
Where we stand
This category is covered by sites with a decade of genuine testing archives behind them. AmazingRibs, Serious Eats and Wirecutter have burned through real fuel on real equipment for years. We have not, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to waste your time.
What we do instead is narrower and, we think, genuinely useful: we read the manuals, the spec sheets and the owner reports so you don’t have to, and we turn the parts that are actually decidable — hydration ratios, cook times, fuel loads, which oven suits which pizza style — into calculators and frameworks you can use in thirty seconds.
That is a real, defensible claim. “We tested it” would not be.
How we research
We read the primary sources
Manufacturer manuals, spec sheets and published documentation. When we quote a figure, we name where it came from — "Ooni lists a max of 950°F for the Koda 16", not "it hits 950°F".
We read owner reports at volume
Long-run reviews, forum threads and warranty complaints tell you what a spec sheet cannot: what fails, what annoys people at month six, and which quoted numbers owners cannot reproduce.
We build the maths
Our calculators come from published formulas — baker’s percentages, established cook-time charts — and we show the working so you can check it rather than trust it.
We say when we are unsure
Where sources disagree or a figure is unverified, we say so. Uncertainty stated plainly is more useful than false precision.
What we don’t do
This is the more important list.
- We have not physically tested these products. There is no lab, no test kitchen, and no measured burn rates, recovery times or temperature curves of our own.
- We do not publish a "we tested 14 grills over 40 hours" methodology, because we did not.
- We do not display prices we cannot verify. Until we have access to Amazon’s Product Advertising API, you get a price band and a link to check the live price yourself.
- We do not accept payment for placement, ranking, or a favourable verdict.
- We do not use manufacturer product photography we have no licence for.
How we make money
Affiliate commission, mostly through Amazon Associates, and paid digital guides. A commission never changes a ranking — but you should not have to take that on faith, which is why every recommendation cites the sources it rests on.
The full policy is on the disclosure page.
Corrections
If we have a figure wrong, we want to know, and we will correct it and date the change. Specs get revised, models get superseded, and a page that was right in March can be wrong by September.