Ninja Woodfire Pro XL review

Ninja Woodfire Pro XL: Introduction

If you’re already a fan of Ninja’s great air fryers – such as the Ninja Foodi FlexDrawer – and / or you’re looking to dip your toes into the world of American-style BBQ smoking, then the Ninja Woodfire Pro XL may be just the device for you.

Unlike a traditional smoker, where the smokey flavour is achieved through burning wood that also acts as the main fuel for the heat, the Ninja lets you cheat by adding pellets to the mix, which are infused to give you a range of smokey finishes, combined with reliable electronic heating elements and a convection fan for even cooking.

Competitively priced at around the $400 / £400 mark, and following up on the success of the non-XL Woodfire, the Pro XL is an absolute beast of an outdoor cooking machine, with a plethora of cooking options available, and easy to use, for even the most unskilled chefs.

Read on for my full Ninja Woodfire Pro XL review to find out just why it has scored a perfect 5-star review.

Design and build

• Size: Cooking plate is 30 x 45cm
• In real terms: Can handle two 3kg chickens
• Weatherproof: IPX4 rated with RCD plug

Getting technical before we get into the details, and the Ninja Woodfire Pro XL is available both sides of the pond, albeit with very slight differences.

The model I had on test for the purposes of this review was the OG850UK model, readers based in the US will be looking at the OG851HGY if they’re going (almost) like-for-like.

Whatever variant you go for, you’re getting the biggest Woodfire on offer. However, although it’s 30% bigger than its non-XL brethren, it has actually lost a few features from the smaller original, namely dehydrating, reheating and baking.

I think that’s because Ninja sees the big boy of the bunch as a meat first machine, especially with the addition of a built in temperature sensor probe on board.

The XL, as the name suggests, is an absolute behemoth of an electric cooker, weighing in at a whopping 18KG and measuring 41cm x 57cm x 51cm.

It’s in no-way a portable machine; once you’ve found a spot for it in your garden then you’ll want to leave it there. And you can, safe in the knowledge that it’s fully weatherproof, with its premium materials designed to withstand outdoor use and year-round cooking and it’s water resistant to rating IPX4.

Ninja does sell a cover for it if you do want to keep it a bit more secure and there are also leg and table accessories that turn it into a more traditional looking grill.

As mentioned, it’s completely safe to cook outdoors with it in all elements; the plug itself is an RCD one, that has its own weatherproofing and shut-down capabilities built in. There’s also a physical power button on the back of the Pro XL, with a waterproof rubber cover.

That big bulk of the XL allows for plenty of cooking; Ninja informs us that the 45cm x 30cm grill plate is capable of handling up to 10 burgers, 40 hotdogs, 2 full racks of ribs, 6 steaks, or two 3kg chickens. The crisper basket can air fry up to 1.8kg of food.

Features

• Smoke box and pellets provide smokey flavour
• Grill, smoker, air-fry and roast modes
• Built-in BBQ thermometer

On the side you’ll find a smoker box that burns natural hardwood pellets, which is what gives the food you cook that BBQ smoke taste.

Ninja provides a couple of bags of pellets in the box, and a scoop to pour them in, and suggests you only use Ninja-branded pellets with the Woodfire. A quick Google suggests some users have taken that advice lightly, with no ill-effects.

The base, with all the controls, feels very Ninja-ish with the different cooking modes – grill, smoker, air-fry and roast – all available to choose via a dial.

There’s also a Woodfire Flavour button which means that it’s not just the smoker mode that benefits from the pellet infusion.

By default, the smoker mode will ignite the pellets and create a smoke-based cook, but all of the other modes don’t – unless you press this button. That means you are in complete control of exactly what foods you want to smoke when cooking on other modes.

For longer cooks, the smoker can be refilled twice, you just need to remember to press the Woodfire Flavour button when you top up, to restart the ignition process.

A new addition to the Pro XL is the built-in BBQ thermometer; a digital probe you insert into your food to keep track of ingredient temperatures. Conveniently stored on a tray that slides under the front panel, the probe plugs in like a pair of headphones when you need to use it.

You can obviously manually cook with this probe, helping you to achieve exact target temperatures but you can also use Ninja’s Smart Cook System to choose from pre-set food types, and select your perfect finish from rare to well done.

Both the internal cooking temperature, and the temperature of the food is displayed on the LED on the front and you’ll also get messages when the cook is finished.

The LED display is also useful during the ignition modes of the smoke box and pre-heating; which is necessary for all modes except the smoker one.

Pre-heating can be a bit slow actually but you are informed of the progress on the LED display.

Performance

I’ve had the Ninja Woodfire Pro XL setup in my garden for a few weeks now and over the Easter weekend I really got a chance to put it through its paces by testing all four cooking methods.

Let’s start with the smoker as I think that’s the biggest selling point of the Woodfire range.

Obviously, the more traditional meats for this aspect would be brisket, pork butt, ribs and the like but, it being Easter, I thought I’d put it through its paces by smoking a shoulder of lamb.

Ninja does supply a brief cook book with the XL but smoked lamb shoulder isn’t exactly mainstream so I had to take to Google to find someone who’d smoked a shoulder of lamb and provided a recipe.

That was easy enough but that person – an American with an impressive beard and a lumberjack shirt, natch – had done his smoking the traditional way.

However, that didn’t matter as all I really needed was guidance on the cooking and target temperatures to get the perfect cook.

The beauty of the Woodfire Pro XL is that it is so, so easy to both maintain a steady temperature and hit your target temperature. For the lamb, I cooked at 120°C (248 Fahrenheit) to achieve a target meat temperature of 94°C (201 Fahrenheit).

If you are cooking more traditional cuts such as brisket or ribs then there are actually pre-set modes on the device itself that you can use, but for my cook I was just able to set my cook temperature and then manually select my target temperature, with the sensor correctly placed in the meat.

My stereotypical American recipe guide suggested this cook would take around 4 hours and he was pretty much spot on.

And the result – a triumph. Smokey, tender, juicy meat with very little effort on my parts. I basically rubbed some oil, seasoning, garlic and rosemary on the lamb, shut the lid and let the Ninja do its thing for 4 hours or so.

I didn’t open the lid once, as I wanted to keep that smokey goodness locked in, with the confidence that the meat wasn’t going to be overdone, thanks to the internal sensor probe keeping me updated with the meat’s current temperature.

While the lamb was resting I replicated a dish that the Ninja professional chefs had actually demoed for me back at the launch event.

It was a simple grilled courgette and prawn starter and I asked the chefs at the time if they’d marinaded or done anything special to the ingredients before cooking and they assured me it was simply the smoke infusion providing the extra flavours.

And they weren’t lying, I simply used the grill mode, with the Woodfire Flavour button pressed, and within about 5 minutes, I’d pretty much replicated the dish.

Next up, I used the roast mode, again with the Woodfire option selected and some pellets inserted, to cook some pigs-in-blankets and belly of pork in a ‘oven’ style setup. Again, I didn’t have to do anything and the extra-smokey flavour was present and really added to the taste.

My final test for the Easter cook out was the air-fryer mode, and some sweet potato wedges. As you’d expect from Ninja, the air-frying was superb and, again, the extra infusion of the smoke flavour made a huge difference.

During cooking – on all modes – the device makes a bit of a hum, which is probably most notable on air-fry mode, but it’s not exactly loud.

You also might panic about the volume of smoke coming out, especially right at the start of a cook, but that is totally normal.

One downside is that, once you are done cooking, either by the grill plate or the air fryer basket, then you are going to have to hand wash these parts as they aren’t dishwasher safe.

All of the fat pours out a hole at the back of the grill and into a drip tray. Ninja actually supplies disposable drip trays that fit into the main one, so you can keep everything a bit cleaner; but I’ve just been washing up the steel tray after every cook, and it’s not a big hassle.

Final thoughs

The Ninja Woodfire Pro XL is a superb, all-in-one, outdoor cooking machine that means that you can achieve the prefect BBQ taste for your meat, every time. But it goes beyond just meat as the smoke infusion can also take grilled and roasted vegetables, and even air-fried food, to the next level too.

How we test

When we publish our reviews, you can rest assured that they are the result of “living with” long term tests.

Because we’re testing new devices all day, everyday, we know what matters and how a particular gadget compares to alternatives that you might also be considering.

Our reviews are comprehensive, objective and fair and, of course, we are never paid directly to review a device.

Read our guide on how we test to learn more.

FAQs

Ninja Woodfire Pro XL: Specifications