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After finding out I couldnt use my mini charcoal grill on my apartment balcony, I needed to find a way to grill inside.I was cooking on my Lodge cast iron pan, and while looking for another cast iron grill pan, i stumbled across this.
It works pretty good, but is a tad hard to clean, and takes a while to heat up.
The seller threw in a free handle mitt and scrubber, which was very nice of them.
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My family and I really enjoy grilling with this product. The pictures do no justice as to how high-tech this product and design really is. I know what I'm getting my friends and family for Christmas this year. Cast Iron Cookware made in the USA. Congratualations on a wonderful new cooking idea and product.Honest reviews on Discount Download PAN Grill-it
I received the grill today and was amazed at how well it was built. It has a clean design and you can't see it in the pictures, but it has a very smooth bottom which makes great contact with a pan.The good: Unlike most grill pans, the ridges are quite high off the pan which really helps to avoid steaming your food instead of grilling. It is made of cast Iron which is great if you are familiar with the pros and cons of CI. If you are not, this product will take a bit of getting used to. It is pre-seasoned which is a big plus.
I grilled a couple of jerk chicken thighs and they turned out quite well. Once again the height of the ridges really makes all the difference compared to other grill pan solutions. No steaming, ok grill marks and the majority of the jerk clumps stayed on the chicken.
I'm also excited to try it as a bacon press or a press for paninis. It seems like it might be the right weight to flatten bacon and the grate spaces will allow the bacon to fry instead of steam in the center. It may also be great for "chicken under a brick" on the gas grill.
The bad: Typically I sear steaks and things at medium heat on my gas cooktop with my CI pan. When I preheated this at medium heat for 15min and put the first thigh on it didn't sizzle. I left that one on and cranked the heat up to med-high and waited a few minutes and still no sizzle. Finally I went almost to the max and finally after a little more preheating the chicken sizzled. My pan was VERY hot and the grill-it was hot enough to create grill marks, but not even close to the heat of the pan. it is just strange that the heat doesn't transfer as well as I expected. So crank the heat, not a huge deal.
The idea that this is smokeless is plain silly. Fat, marinade, etc drips between the grates and hits the incredibly hot cast iron pan below and immediately turns into smoke (which is better than steam of course). My kitchen was full of smoke pretty quickly.
Cleaning is a bit harder than expected. Just plain meat or chicken without sauce/marinade would probably be easy to cleanup. Even the jerk sauce created a char between the pan and the grill-it that took more than a little elbow grease to clean up. I would imagine teriyaki chicken would take way more effort. After getting it clean, I treated it like all my CI and just dried it well on stovetop and rubbed it down with a little oil.
All in all I like the Grill-It a lot. The Grill-it will be a great multitasking addition to my kitchen. The price is a little steep for CI as a CI grill pan costs less than this unit. For me it is still worth the extra money because of how versatile it is.
Update 10/5/2013
Ok I pushed my luck and tried teriyaki tonight. Everything went great until I tried to clean the pan. The Pan Grill-it once separated from the 12"CI pan, which took a lot of effort, cleaned up pretty easily. On the other hand, the teriyaki sauce that dropped fused with the seasoning on the pan. I guess I'm re-seasoning my pan this weekend... how sad for me. Still like the Pan Grill-It, but it has limits.
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