Side Dishes on Bake Plate

Holiday Party Planning

Make side dishes with your grill’s bake plate

The holiday season can be tough when it comes to planning out how you’re going to cook everything for your holiday meals. At best, you have a double oven, but even that isn’t enough to cover all the courses you need for a holiday meal. The key to good holiday party planning is figuring out how to best use the resources you have in your kitchen to make holiday cooking easier.

The nice thing about having a grill with an interchangeable bake/griddle plate is that you can use it as an alternate baking dish. At least some of your side dishes can be baked in your electric grill using the bake plate, which will ease up the load you’re putting on your oven. This way, the oven can be saved for things like the big dish main course and everything can be cooked at the same time to be ready at the same time.

So what can you cook in your bake plate? Basically, you can do almost anything you do in your oven – casseroles, strata and even quiche can all be cooked in the bake plate. The cooking method is the same – i.e. your oven bakes by cooking from the top and bottom, but so does a contact grill. Since all of our electric grill models with a bake plate have variable temperature as well, you can adjust the temperature just like you would in your oven, so both appliances cook food the same way.

If you’re going to be doing a side dish in the bake plate on your grill, there are a few things you need to determine:

Is the size of the bake plate the same size as the baking dish called for in your recipe? If not, you will need to make sure that the dish will fit, then you will need to adjust the cooking time slightly and check it periodically

Are the sides of the bake plate high enough so the dish won’t spill over as it cooks? Often, baked dishes will rise at least slightly, so you need to be sure the bake plate won’t overflow as it cooks.

While the side dish is cooking, you will want to check it periodically to avoid overcooking. Often, your grill will actually bake faster than a regular oven because there’s less open space where the air is circulating, so it maintains a more constant temperature. As such, the dish may finish sooner than you expect and you want to avoid overcooking. Ideally, you should try the dish prior to cooking it for the big meal just to make sure, but as long as you monitor cooking progress, you should be safe.

 

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