Rotisserie cooking is amazing. I spun a chicken last night. I've done it spatchcock on the kettle too, but during the week charcoal just adds that much more time to the whole thing, and for me I'm not good enough on a charcoal grill to be able to relax while I'm cooking a chicken on one so it is at least an hour of me freaking out making sure temperatures are where they should be and everything. The gas grill rotisserie chicken is at this point five minutes of prep for dry brining either night before or morning of, then another ten minutes prep to make a rub and more recently stuff the cavity with onions garlic and citrus. Last night I threw in a clementine for fun. Anyhow, then it spins for a little more than an hour and boom, some of the best chicken you can eat. And for this, nothing beats east west burners.
I'm realizing now what with the discussion of deep box vs shallow, I think the extra flavorizers on the thousands does cause the grill to warm up a little less quickly, I need to open the front burner fully and the rear burner mostly to hit 400+ when I spin, and I do not take out any flavorizer bars, and I do put in a drip pan now, which also probably impacts the temperature at the spit. I used to wonder how that could be possible, but after making some pizzas on a big hunk of marble in the grill, I came to realize that it really does take at least 30 minutes to get the marble hot hot (over 450 degrees). Now that I think about it, the heat from the burners has to heat up all thirteen flavorizer bars (thick ss RCP ones), then thick SS grates (also RCP) and finally a 3/4 inch slab of marble. For the rotisserie setup, I'm still heating up all of those flavorizer bars before we hit stasis in there, and I'm not sure if taking out some flavos would cause more heat more quickly for rotisserie. I'm not about to find out either, because I have my system now and there isn't a reason to change it. I don't mind a few extra minutes of fuel consumption thanks to the natural gas setup I run which I am still actively happy about every time I turn the local shutoff on. Last night was the second rotisserie chicken with the new electric receptacle right next to the grill so no extension cord.
Basically, I think everybody has their grill set up for how they ended up preferring to use it. Over time, you can make little adjustments or big ones, from adding RCP grates all the way to adding an entire other grill or grills. That is the beauty of the old grills too, I think. For a few bucks you can acquire them. For a few more you can get them running and looking brand new. For a couple extra you can go better than new with upgrades and custom work. But you're not showing up at the house with an obviously expensive shiny grill that costs enough to have to talk to your wife. But you end up making such delicious food on it that nobody complains.
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