A man's desire to barbecue over open flame, with kids playing in the yard and a beer in hand, only gets more intense once you introduce a big wheel that controls an adjustable-height grilling surface. As if tending to coals and meat placement weren't enough to play with already.
A parrilla, also called a gaucho grill or Santa Maria grill, describes a style of charcoal barbecue in which the grill itself is raised or lowered by hand over the coals, giving the cook direct control over how much heat and smoke reaches the food.
The style originated with Argentinian gauchos, who used it to cook beef as they moved across the countryside – though some histories also credit indigenous Americans as the first to use it. It asks you to think about the stage of the cook and of the coal burn together, and gives you more to play with because of it.
As a photographer, I think about the relationship between heat, height, and placement like that of shutter speed, ISO, and f-stop. Many combinations will get the job done, but it’s up to the user to nail the perfect combination. As a lover of outdoor cooking, I’ve run all three of the usual alternatives: a Weber, a cheap offset I mostly used as a grill, and a pellet smoker I still own but barely touch, because it's an all-day commitment for a fairly narrow use case.
The P1 Legless from Pig & Pilgrim covers the ground the Weber and the offset cover between them, but the height adjustment changes how you manage the cook. Instead of constantly feeding or moving coals to control heat, you just wind the grill closer to the fire or further away. Less fuel-tending, more direct control over the outcome. The rotisserie then covers the low-and-slow territory the pellet smoker used to own, without asking for a full day's commitment to get there.
As the Pig & Pilgrim story goes, founder Charlie went looking for a parrilla-style barbecue with a wheel to adjust the grill's height over the fire, and the only ones he found suitable sat around $5,000 to $6,000. So he built his own.
What started as a lockdown passion turned into a business once friends spotted the results on his Instagram, soon asking where he'd got the barbecue. Pig & Pilgrim now builds out of a factory in Mittagong, in the NSW Southern Highlands, with every barbecue still made to order.
The range has grown well beyond the original design, from the twin-grill Deuce to wood-burning models with a brasero on the side. The Deuce gives you two separate height-adjustable grilling surfaces on the one unit, for when a single grill isn't enough. It looks the part, but for a home setup it's more barbecue than most people need to be managing at once.
I went with the P1 for the opposite reason: one wheel, one grill, one heat source to think about. It's the simplest version of a parrilla, and the legless variant I run slots straight onto an existing outdoor kitchen bench rather than adding another freestanding unit to the yard.
Build-wise, it's a handsome piece of equipment. Solid steel throughout, a 3mm firebox, expanded steel grill, and a hand wheel that's the visual centrepiece of the unit and now my backyard – you just want to turn it.
With dimensions of 870mm wide x 500mm deep, capacity is impressive to say the least. The P1 will handle four full racks of ribs, or six to eight halves, comfortably, along with sausages for the kids, and that's before you factor in the hanging racks that slot into the top bar, which allow you to keep food warm or cook vegetables or seafood slowly above the main surface.
Honestly, I can't think of an occasion where I'd need more room than what the P1 offers, and if I did, I would likely run the rotisserie and the grill together, with a thicc rib eye cooking low and slow above the working spit.
Desperate to get cooking, and ignoring the impending weather warning, my first beef cook was a rump cap. It rained. I wouldn’t say it was a huge success, but it set an easy benchmark to beat. I have since cooked steaks, chicken thighs, corn, cabbage, and more. Pork ribs were a highlight, too, seasoned generously and wrapped in foil and baking paper, then rested above the coals for hours before finishing over high heat to add texture and char.
As was a crispy porchetta cooked on the rotisserie, which was hand-rolled with fresh thyme and rosemary, then rotated over glowing embers for around two-and-a-half hours. Easily some of the best pork I've ever eaten. The rotisserie has been a standout for me; we cooked two whole chickens the week after the porchetta, brushed with homemade peri-peri sauce, and the result was nothing short of sensational.
Charcoal is the preferable fuel for cooking, as you can get it firing in a chimney and onto the bricks in batches much faster than it takes to burn wood down.
Cleaning is where the P1 asks more of you than I anticipated. A wire brush handles the top of the grill fine, but working underneath flicks grease straight back at you, so a coarse dish sponge becomes essential. You also need to press the grill firmly against the upright while cleaning it, or it rattles as you wipe.
More than once, the rain has arrived soon after a cook, while waiting for the ash to cool, turning what should be a quick job into something irksome: bricks out of the base, water scooped out, then the wet ash and leftover coals scooped out after it. Interestingly, there's no drainage hole anywhere in the bucket, so once water is inside the base it stays there, seeping out of the weld joints slowly, weathering the frame.
The absence of drainage is the clearest miss with the P1. Put simply, anyone considering a unit from Pig & Pilgrim that is going to live outside should budget for a custom cover. They have a similar lead time, so be sure to order with the product so the grill is protected from day one. I’m currently using a generic BBQ cover, and it’s just not cutting the mustard.
My legless P1 sits on a built-in granite bench, and after talking it through with Charlie, I settled on a hebel block (aerated concrete) base to protect the stone underneath, though it's not a look I'm particularly fond of. I think the option to add small legs for a future version, just enough to lift the unit off whatever surface it's sitting on, would solve both the aesthetic and the moisture problem for outdoor kitchens like mine.
On price – $2,850 for the legless model – the P1 sits in the handmade, made-to-order tier of the market, well above the mass-imported Santa Maria grills that flood Amazon and generic BBQ retailers for a few hundred to a thousand dollars, and well below the built-in systems from brands like Kalamazoo that Winnings is retailing for $65,000! Against that middle tier, it's competitive, even more so than rival Australian brands.
As a cooking apparatus that lives outdoors, it’s important to embrace patina and focus on what it’s like to actually cook on, and I can assure you there’s nothing quite like it. Standing next to the P1 working the wheel, monitoring the coals, and investing deeply in the process is what it’s all about. It can quickly turn a Wednesday-night sirloin into an occasion, and a weekend gathering into a core memory for friends and family.
Guests gravitate towards the grill before they gravitate towards the cheese platter, and most don't leave without asking where we got it. For an outdoor space that's meant to be lived in, not just looked at, the P1 earns its place as the centrepiece.