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Has anyone used GrillGrates ?


rotuts

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Try flipping them over and cook on the flat side.

 

Ditto. Love this technique. No grill marks but an amazing crust that can develop quickly enough to leave a rare interior. I'll admit to burning a couple steaks until I got used to the intense heat.

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Will these mitigate a weak/cool gas grill? The one on my building's rooftop suuuuucks - it can't sear steak properly at all. 

 

I replaced the grates on my expensive looking but cheap costing walmart grill. Previously I would be hard pressed to hit an indicated 400º (on thermometer on lid) on anything but a hot sunny day. I replaced my entire cooking surface with grill grates, and now it heats like a weber/broilking where you can't just leave it on high the entire time. I may agree with btbyrd on the crust building, I wonder if I could flip two of my 6 grillgrates permanently to have both surfaces available. I did do some steaks on the grillgrates a few weeks ago and while the lines were excellent, the area in the center just didn't get the crust we all love. However I DID enjoy not having to deal with massive flare ups when doing lambchops

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it makes a great bit of difference if you have some sort of home-made or not 'smoker' which you toss on there while cooking.

 

aluminum foil w some wood chips  ( a few holes in the foil bundle ) and a propane torch to get it going is fine

 

since you are going fast grilling, only a few minutes, you can smoke dirty, as Franklin explains.

Edited by rotuts (log)
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personally, I think some find this a visual cue for 'great grilling'

 

so why not have both ?

 

me not so much.

 

they say we eat w our eyes first.

 

after all, look at all the fine stuff we see here, but can't smell nor taste.

Edited by rotuts (log)
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Well if your grill fire is hot enough you can get searing between the marks too.

But this is something that has to be done intentionally when you build the fire. Not on a stock gas grill usually.

That's why the flat side of the grillgrates that cooks a la plancha is so useful. Continual crust!

You can get frozen cooked chx breast with factory grill marks.

Edited by Dave W (log)
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I can get the grates up over 800F if I run my Weber wide open and that's still not hot enough to get significant browning between grate marks (unless you overcook everything and let the grill marks totally carbonize). I'm going to flip two of my GrillGrates over so I have a dedicated plancha portion of the grill and see how that works. The advantage of using the Searzall over the plancha (at least for steaks) is that a plancha heats primarily by conduction while the Searzall does not. You can develop a serious crust with the Searzall yet leave the interior basically untouched by the extra heat. If you sear hard on a plancha, you have to be much more careful with the heat because the heat at the exterior is constantly being conducted/diffused through the meat. The plancha surface may be well-suited for "the Heston method" of turning the meat every 10-15 seconds.

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if you have used the Flatter Side, which i have not, have you 'seasoned' it ?

 

I don't remember seasoning the flat side before use. I've had them several years and may be forgetting. I have had a couple things stick to the ridges on the grate side (most notably pizza dough) but when I'm using the flat side is is usually for a fatty rib eye steak.

Edited by cyalexa (log)
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did it do the job for you ?

 

 

I'm on the fence about it still. I threw a steak on last night, albeit a little hastily, and it didn't crust up quite as much as I'd like. Maybe I didn't wait long enough for the surface to heat up. I need to get a IR thermometer so I don't need to guess at these things based on how violently a drop of water evaporates

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did it do the job for you ?

 

 

Round 2 (I've eaten steak for 3 meals so far this week... test cooking is fun) I let the grill heat up for a good amount of time before throwing steaks onto it, and got a nice crusty maillard reaction across the entire surface. Comparable to the sear I did on a frying pan of grape seed oil on Monday night. 

 

I have, however, come to the conclusion that there is no saving round steak. there is simply no way to make it enjoyable. 

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did it do the job for you ?

 

 

threw some burgers on the flat surface this weekend, nice maillard crust on the outside after 3 minutes/side. No fancy grill marks though. I guess at that point I might as well have seared on a frying pan in the kitchen? 

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But did it taste grilled? 

 

I feed a 2 and 4 year old, some times there is time to taste my food, some times not. It certainly didn't taste like a griddle fried fast food burger, but short of that I don't know that I could pin point what "grilled" tastes like. 

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consider some wood chips before hand  to 'smoke' a bit on the GG's before you do the burgers

 

aluminum foil works, or those aluminum 'pie pans'  you fold them over and use them over and over again.

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I'll have to give the woodchips thing a try sometime soon

 

I grilled some chicken thighs last night and was very pleased to not have to deal with the usual resulting inferno. There was a bit of flames ON TOP of the grates initially as the oil in the marinade burned off, but at no point did I return to the grill to find it engulfed in flames

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  • 3 weeks later...

finally got around to throwing a decent steak onto the flat surface last night. 1.5" thick ribeye, cooked SV at 136.5 (was too medium, I'll take it down 2º next time) for 2 hours. 60s per side on the estimated 500º griddle grates (newly coined term?) created an amazing crust while leaving the inside pink and juicy. There was a bit of a hollow on one side of the steak that didn't contact the griddle and as such didn't get seared. Would it have on the grill side? maybe, maybe not. I am hesitant to press down on meats for fear of squeezing the juice out

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