Can one of you GF grill lovers out there please convince my spouse that the grill does cook faster, and therefore you don’t have to leave the thawed chicken breasts on the thing for 20 minutes? Furthermore, if you DO leave chicken breasts cooking away in the grill for 20 minutes what you get resembles sawdust wrapped in shoe leather. You know what’s funny? If you cook chicken in it again, and again you cook it for 20 minutes, you still get sawdust wrapped in shoe leather! Amazing! No matter how many times you cook underseasoned unmarinated chicken breasts in the GF grill for 20 minutes, you will take out the same unedible little chicken briquettes with charming brown grill marks on the tops and bottoms.
Six to eight minutes. Six to eight freaking minutes is all that is required!!!
I’m sorry. Apparently this is a sore spot with me.
We no longer have grease trays. Someone preheated the thing with the grease trays and little plastic cleaning tool inside and the grease trays got all gooey and also had attractive grill marks on them. A small plate fits inbetween the grill’s feet and works just as well.
[HIJACK]Is this true? I have and love my own GF grill, but I’ve always thawed meat before grilling; is it fully cooked if you put it on cold & hard?[/HIJACK]
[HIJACK2]I think I’ve told the story before but if not I’ll mention it here- my mother was a Southern woman of Jewish and German ancestry who loved drippings [something in all three of those cultures] and fried everything. When her doctor told her she needed to cut the grease from her diet she had no idea how (or why) to do that, so I bought her a G. Foreman grill and showed her how to grill steaks and chops and prime rib on it. She loved it.
The next time I came to the house she cooked us some prime rib on the GF, then said “My favorite thing about this gadget is how it cooks it juicy and quick, but it catches all the drippings for you”, and she poured the drippings from the catcher back over the meat.
I have to admit it was pretty good though.
While the GF cooks faster, I have no idea how much faster. Since it’s cooking from top and bottom at once does that automatically mean it’s cooking twice as fast as it would from only one side? I’m not sure.
I suspect the only thing that would really work is to get a meat thermometer so that you have scientific proof.
I’ve done both chicken breasts and hamburgers cold from the freezer.
The burger patties are those 1/4 lb ones that come pre-formed. They certainly don’t need any thawing. I toss them frozen onto my regular gas grill, too. Grill to bun, just fine.
The chicken was just standard ice-encrusted, flash-frozen breasts. I’m thinking I’m cheating myself on this a bit. Marinated in a bit of salad dressing in a sandwich bag and tossed, thawed, onto the GFG would probably be better. I, however, hadn’t planned a whit for dinner that day and tried it out from frozen. It worked but needed more flavor.
I would WAG the GFG uses less power then other means of cooking, perhaps except for the microwave. You have direct contact with the food on 2 sides, transferring heat through conduction and giving off very little heat.
Even if you cook with gas, which is a more efficient means of generating heat then electric, in a oven you are heating up the entire oven and much of the room . In a gas stove much heat goes around the pot into the room. But it their defense, gas cooking where the waste heat is not vented outside can be beneficial in the winter where that heat goes to heating the house with close to 100% efficiency as opposed to maybe a 80% efficient gas furnace.
I must not be using my George Foreman Grill in a way that properly befits its majesty. It’s satisfactory as a press for making Cuban sandwiches, except that I have to use a potholder to avoid burning my palm when I lean down on the top.
The only other thing I tried to cook with it were hot dogs, which kept slipping down its patented fat-reducing, non-stick slope and landing on the floor. I suppose that did reduce the fat content of my meal, as I threw the partially warmed, cat-hair-covered franks into the disposal and dined that night on buns with ketchup and mustard.
I use mine for pork chops from time to time since they need to be marinated, but I don’t care to do plain chicken breast on it. I find that it makes the outside just too dried out and tough. I keep meaning to try to use it as a stand in panini press…
I bought one a few months ago and still use it almost nightly. Chicken breasts come out GREAT - nice and jucy, but with a nicely crisped outside. Burgers are a no-brainer. Shrimp, perfect. Tuna steaks were a little tough, but they always are. Salmon fillets are perfect. Hotdogs and sausages are perfect.
The only thing I don’t like is the cleanup - I end up using a ton of paper towels (which I don’t normally buy) each time, and even then it’s a 10-minute pain to get it clean.
This Pitting has been needed for a long time, at least in my house, thanks for making it. I can’t stand the George Foreman - it dries everything out to a crisp, takes longer to cook than just doing it in a pan, and takes me at least 10 minutes to clean (which is a horribly messy process in itself). You know, sometimes fat and grease actually add flavor to food, it’s there for a reason! Yet about once a month my wife will suggest we cook something on it!
Are you daft?!? I love my non-stick pans, but these yabbos can’t manage to clean a Foreman Grill, and you think they can manage a non-stick pan?
You’re really just hoping that they’ll scratch up pan, and die of some form of poisoning from eating all the non-stick coating they’ve scraped off, aren’t you?
Because, yeah, I like my non-stick pans, but they scratch if I so much as look at them forcefully. Which means I’m wiping them down with paper towels and a little soap. Which is basically what I have to do for my Foreman Grill. So there’s no difference, except the latter doesn’t scratch up like mad.
And it makes panninis easy, without needing a grill-pan and a brick or something.
That thing always looked ridiculous to me. Of course you can cook pizza on it, but what else? As you said, there are numerous things you can cook on it, but why buy it? My oven doesn’t heat up my whole kitchen, and none of the frozen pizzas I’ve ever seen have directions for anything other than an oven. I can cook square and over-sized pizzas in the oven, as well as the ones designed to be cooked right on the oven rack.
I’m sure that Alton Brown would decry it as being a “unitasker”, but that’s probably not quite fair as it does cook wings and fish sticks like you said.
Maybe it’s the idea of the heating cycles that the food goes through that bugs me. I’ve worked in several pizza stores, and all the big guys use conveyor ovens, so the concept of moving food through heat isn’t new to me. However, the ovens provide a rather steady stream of heat while the food is being cooked, there is no part of the cooking process where the food is removed from the heat. I won’t get into the specific details of the ovens I’ve used/disassembled/cleaned/reassembled, they have “fingers” that deliver the heated air in arrays, but that’s really different than what the Pizzazz does.
I had one - it was a giant PITA to use. My soon-to-be-ex thought it was great and couldn’t understand why I prefered the oven and a pizza stone for making pizza.
Yes, it’s a uni-tasker and takes up an ungodly amount of storage space. I never quite got the concept of having just a third of the pizza exposed to the heat source at a time. It was one of the things I tossed out the door behind him when I kicked out said soon-to-be-ex.
I also have a George Foreman grill, and I love it. I have the one with the removeable grill plates, and it’s a snap to clean up. I’ve done frozen burgers on it (frozen turkey burgers take 6 minutes, IIRC), and chicken is really easy.
The Pitting here should be the lazy roommates, not the grill.
