Black Earth Grills - Gaucho 53: Review
A Serious Live-Fire Grill Built for Big Cooking, Big Heat, and Big Gatherings
If you love live-fire cooking (South-American-style cooking in particular) and you want a grill that immediately becomes the centrepiece of your backyard, the Black Earth Grills Gaucho 53 absolutely delivers.
First things first: this is not a lightweight backyard barbecue. In fact, calling it a barbecue at all is almost insulting to the Gaucho. The Gaucho 53 is a serious grill with serious cooking space, serious steel, and one of the most thoughtfully designed live-fire cooking systems I have used.
The Kind of Grill You Build Your Backyard Around
The first thing you notice is the size.
There is a massive amount of usable cooking area here, which completely changes the way you approach outdoor cooking. You’ll stop thinking in terms of “will it fit on the grill” and start thinking more creatively about cooking styles, zones, timing, and entertaining for larger groups. If whole-protein cooks are your thing, you won’t have too many constraints with the Black Earth Grills Gaucho 53.
While I’ve put this grill through the paces with everything from steaks, to sausages, to chicken, ribs and more, what I really love about this rig is its potential for asado-style cooking, often with an iron cross (beef ribs is a go-to) positioned over the grill surface (coals below and nearby firebox). The can Gaucho 53 handle this style of live-fire cooking beautifully, and of course, it’s right on theme. Whether you’re cooking steaks, vegetables, sausages, seafood, whole cuts, or slow-fire South American-style ribs, this grill feels built for the task.
Note: The iron cross does not come with the Gaucho, but it does fit nicely.
Built for Experimentation
Speaking of build, the build quality here is exceptional. You can tell that this company has a lot of pride in what they produce. Everything about the Gaucho 53 feels heavy-duty, overbuilt in the best possible way, and designed to last for years of heavy-duty use. The firebox itself deserves special mention because it is substantial enough to produce a serious amount of coal for longer cooks and larger gatherings.
One notable difference compared to some traditional gaucho or Santa Maria-style grills is the grate design. Many gaucho grills use V-style grates, but Black Earth Grills chose porcelain-coated rod grates instead. That’s worth noting if you love V grates. Maybe they will offer this as an option in the future. The porcelain grates are a different approach, but one that works in practice and is relatively easy to cook on and maintain.
The cooking height adjustment system is also different from what many people may expect. Rather than using a pulley system like a Santa Maria, the Gaucho 53 uses a four-position adjustable cooking platform. You raise and lower the entire grate assembly manually, one side at a time (or with two people, at once – but that’s not required). This process works smoothly, even when cooking solo, and you can adjust the grate height with the firebox still in place. The crank-style lift mechanisms on Santa Maria grills look cool and everything, but they also take up a lot of vertical space and can have issues (more moving parts and pullies). So there’s something to be said for simplicity and a rig that’s easier to cover and allows for setting up an iron cross. Personally, I prefer the set-up of the Black Earth Grills Gaucho 53 to the alternative.
Designed for Fire, Heat, and Long Cooks
The Gaucho 53 measures 56” long x 29” deep and 40” tall. You get over 1,000 square inches of grilling space to play with. Plus, there are optional cutting boards that can be mounted on either side of the unit, making it very convenient for food prep and accessories. There are no hooks for tongs and other items, but I am working on find a spot for some S hooks to take care of that.
The firebox setup is one of the smartest parts of the design. Once you’ve built up enough coal by burning hardwood in the firebox, the firebox can be removed entirely and replaced with an additional cooking grate, maximizing the already huge cooking surface. It’s a very clever system that adds even more flexibility to an already versatile grill.
Coal management is also meant to be easy with a flip-down front access door (the two wooden handles in the photos), which makes feeding and moving coals far simpler than on many other live-fire cookers.
However, the one challenge I have with this unit is that once the steel coal bed heats up, the metal expands, which makes it impossible for me to open the coal access door during the cook. In my case, there appears to be a slight manufacturing defect where locking slot on the left side of the access door gets expanded by the heat, effectively locking the door in the closed position no matter how hard you try to lift it up and out. This is an issue that I am trying to address (possibly by loosening the hinge bolts on the coal door to allow more sideways movement — which might allow me to wiggle the one side that “locks” back into alignment, or by filing the slot or latch with a metal file). I have reached out to Black Earth Grills to see what suggestions they may have to address this issue.
Door issues aside, another thing I genuinely appreciate is the mobility of this unit. For a grill this large and heavy, it moves surprisingly well thanks to the oversized rubber wheels Black Earth Grills includes. Moving it around the patio or yard is far easier than you would expect from something this substantial. It’s verging on all-terrain capability.
Thoughtful Details Matter
One thing I absolutely have to call out is the assembly process and the quality of the instructions.
Yes, you will need to assemble the grill, and yes, it takes some time. Some steps are definitely easier with two people because this is a heavy-duty unit (weighing in at 280 pounds according to BEG). It would be hard to do by yourself. But the instructions are honestly the best assembly instructions I have ever encountered for any product.
They are clear, detailed, logical, and incredibly well organized. Black Earth Grills even includes the new cumulative weight of the unit at each major assembly step, which sounds like a small detail until you realize how helpful that actually is during the build. It is one of those thoughtful touches that tells you the company genuinely cares about the ownership experience.
The Backyard Showstopper
And once assembled, the Gaucho 53 becomes a complete showstopper in the backyard.
Much like its cousin, the Teppan 29 (but on a much larger scale) this is the kind of grill people immediately gravitate toward. Guests love it. They ask questions about it. They gather around it. It creates a social style of cooking that feels very different from simply standing behind a conventional gas grill.
For South American cooking, live-fire barbecue, global dishes, or even familiar backyard favourites, the Gaucho 53 is endlessly capable. There are also several accessories available that expand its versatility even further. For example, you can swap in a griddle surface in place of a grate if you want to lean more into plancha-style cooking.
There really isn’t much that you can’t do with this unit and if you’re looking for a versatile, upscale and heavy duty live-fire cooker (that’s made in Canada, for good measure), look no further than the Gaucho 53 by Black Earth Grills.
While this grill was provided to me by the company, it’s important to note that I would not recommend or review it positively if I did not genuinely believe it earned it. And in this case, Black Earth Grills absolutely built a winner.
By Mike Belobradic
Founder of Smoke Fire Grill™ and the Northern Barbecue™ Method of Live-Fire Cooking.