Archive for March, 2010
Correctly Loading Cooking Plates
Tips & Tricks: Loading Your Cooking Plates Correctly
Have you ever needed to cook food on your grill for longer than expected? The problem may be that you’re overloading the cooking plates, which can cause longer cooking times – it may also affect the quality of your finished plates of food. In this post, we’ll be giving tips on loading your plates correctly to achieve more even results within the recommended cooking times found in your Use & Care manual.
The first key is not to overload the bottom plate – you can’t overstuff your grill with food and expect that it will cook with the same quality and quickness that it would for a regular load. If individual pieces are touching each other on the sides because there so much food on the grill, this will affect your results and take longer to cook because there is more food than the embedded heating element can handle.
A fixed plate grill with embedded heating elements
You also don’t want any edges or sides of the food hanging out beyond edge of the cooking plate. As we mentioned in our feature focus post, the embedded heating elements are designed to provide even heat from the center to the sides of the plate, but food that goes beyond this won’t cook correctly because it’s not coming into contact with the heating element.
The last key to correctly loading your cooking plates is to make sure that the food is all the same thickness – both on individual pieces and the plate as a whole. Since contact grills, by design, cook from both sides, the top plate needs to be touching the food to cook correctly in the time provided. If any piece or part of a piece isn’t touching the top plate, it won’t cook like everything else. For steaks in particular, you won’t get that steakhouse quality center of pinkness – the same issue you have if you don’t turn the meat often enough on a regular grill.
So how do you know how much food to put on the plate to have it cook correctly? A good rule of thumb is that an average serving size equals about 20 sq. in. of space on your grill. If you know the size of your grill, simply divide that number by 20; this will give you a rough estimate of your grill’s serving size. Obviously some foods, like flank or skirt steak for instance, will take up more space, but this formula works as a general rule for things like burgers, chicken breasts, chops and sausage patties.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day from George Foreman
Happy St. Patrick’s Day from George Foreman
From all of us on the George Foreman team, to all of you and yours, we’d like to wish you a good, happy and safe St. Patrick’s Day! We hope you get time to enjoy some great grilled food and your favorite green beverage with the ones you love.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day from George Foreman!
Spring Break Snacks on Your Grill
The Best Spring Break Snacks on Your George Foreman Grill
For kids and college students, spring break is a whole week to just kick back and relax, but for moms it can mean a lot of extra meals and mouths to feed. College students come home, everyone has friends over and they’re (of course) all hungry for good home cooked food.
So how do you make everyone happy without spending your whole day cooking in the kitchen? It’s easy with your George Foreman grill! From crowd-pleasing burgers and hot dogs, to more interesting party fare, you can do a lot of meals on your George Foreman with minimal hassle and cleanup. That way, the kids and their friends get full and you still have time left in your day to do everything you need to get done.
Really, the nice thing about using your grill for spring break cooking is the minimal effort that it takes – one cooking surface to clean (even easier if you have removable plates that can be thrown in the dishwasher), minimal prep time to start and everything is typically done in under ten minutes. It’s just a matter of planning and buying ingredients for a few simple meals and you can be set for all those emergency Spring Break mealtimes that you know will pop up through the week.
For a regular George Foreman grill, here is a quick and easy top ten list of the best foods you can make to satisfy your Spring Break bunch:
- Hamburgers / mini-burgers / sliders
- Hot dogs
- Grilled shrimp
- Grilled chicken / steak sandwiches
- BBQ steak bites
- Kebabs
- Bangers & mash / Bangers & mac (sausage and mashed potatoes, or substitute mac & cheese for a more kid-oriented meal)
- Fajitas
- Pork chops
- Grilled cheese sandwiches
Package brownies made in the Kitchen Bistro
If you have a multi-plate grill with a bake plate or other accessory plates, you have even more options to choose from. Here are some additional kid-friendly meals using some of the additional plates offered from George Foreman:
- Pizza – classic pizza can be made using the pizza pan on your 360 Grill™
- Quesadillas – used the 360 Grill™ quesadilla plates or the George Foreman Quesadilla Maker
- Brownies – use the bake pan on the Kitchen Bistro™ Grill with a regular packaged brownie mix (may work with other bake plates, but you will need to adjust the size and cook time)
- Lunch lasagna – you can make this with any George Foreman grill that has a deep-dish bake pan
- Late breakfast – you can use the bake or griddle pan on any George Foreman grill to do sausage, eggs and pancakes; some grills also include waffle plates
No matter how many mouths you’ll have to feed, Spring Break cooking is just easier with a George Foreman grill. You can use the list provided and have the whole week’s worth of meals already planned, so you can make easy work of pleasing all the hungry kids at your house during their break.
George Tough Nonstick Coating
Feature Focus: George Tough™ Nonstick Coating
It’s time for another look at how George Foreman grills are designed to help you cook healthier without a hassle. This month, our Feature Focus takes a closer look at the George Tough™ nonstick coating.
While almost any contact grill you buy nowadays will have a nonstick coating, the quality of the coating can be drastically different and can affect the performance and durability of your grill. A bad nonstick coating can peel after washing or scrubbing and a low-quality nonstick coating may still require oil or butter to prevent delicate foods from sticking to the plate during cooking. These two factors make getting a grill with a high-quality nonstick coating vital to grilling healthier and to extending the life of your grill.
Every George Foreman grill comes with our George Tough™ nonstick coating, which provides several benefits in the way it’s designed to work.
George Tough Nonstick Coating helps prevent sticking on delicate foods
First, the quality of our coating helps ensure you don’t need to season the cooking surface with oil or butter when cooking your foods – even for delicate foods like veggies and fish. You can simply put the food directly on the grill and avoid the added fat and calories of the oil or butter.
The second benefit comes in our multi-coat system. Our George Tough™ nonstick isn’t just applied once. Instead, it’s coated multiple times to help protect against cracking and peeling. This extends the life of your grill, plus allows you to wash the grill plates in the dishwasher if your grill has removable plates. In other words, you spend less time cleaning and get more uses out of your grill, overall.
We believe in our nonstick coating so much that we had it tested against a major competitor to see how the coatings stack up. The test was done using the Next Grilleration G5 with the George Tough™ triple nonstick versus a major competitor’s grill. Each grill plate was run through the same abrasion test that scrubs the plates back and forth to test the wear. The competitor’s coating wore out after 7000 scrubs, while the George Tough™ triple nonstick on the G5 was still good after 150,000 scrubs.
So, the George Tough™ nonstick coating is specifically designed to help you cook healthier without oil/butter, extend the life of your grill and minimize cleanup – it’s three benefits from one feature.
Waffle Plate Recipes
From the Cookbook: Recipes for Your George Foreman Waffle Plates
Some FaceBook fans have been searching for waffle recipes for their George Foreman waffle plate sets. Several of our removable plate grills actually come with a waffle plate set that lets you make waffles directly on your grill. The Next Grilleration™ G5 and the Kitchen Bistro™ G4 Waffle both come with waffle plates included; the 360 Grill™ has accessory waffle plates that are sold separately.
Heart-shaped waffle plates for the 360 Grill
The two recipes provided were made using the 360 Grill™ Waffle Plates. The grills don’t have the same capacity, so the recipes below will need to be adjusted for the other two models because the plates are smaller (or you can just make more waffles). To make it easy, the numbers below show the amount of batter and approximate cook times you will use on each grill:
360 Grill™: 1½ – 1¼ cups of batter; cook on High for about 8 minutes.
Kitchen Bistro™ G4: ⅔ – 1 cup of batter; cook at 425°F for about 6 – 8 minutes
Next Grilleration™ G5: ⅔ cup of batter; cook on HIGH for about 3 – 5 minutes
WHOLE WHEAT WAFFLES
- 1½ cups all-purpose flour
- 1½ cups whole wheat flour
- 4 tsp. baking powder
- 1½ tsp. baking soda
- ¼ cup sugar
- 1 tsp. salt
- 6 large eggs
- 3 cups buttermilk
- ½ cup butter, melted*
Preheat your grill with the waffle plates in place.
Meanwhile in a large bowl, combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar and salt; stir to blend. In a second bowl, beat eggs; blend in buttermilk and butter. Add to flour mixture all at once and blend until just smooth.
Pour 1¼ cups of batter onto the center of the waffle plates. Close the lid and bake about 8 minutes until the lid opens easily and waffles are golden.
Repeat with remaining batter.
Serve immediately with maple or boysenberry syrup, if desired.
Tip: This also makes a great dessert topped with vanilla frozen yogurt or ice cream and caramel sauce.
*If desired, you can substitute margarine or canola oil for butter.
BANANA BACON WAFFLES
- 2½ cups all-purpose flour
- 1½ tbsp. baking powder
- 1½ tbsp. sugar
- ¾ tsp. salt
- 5 large eggs
- 2¼ cups milk
- ¼ cup butter, melted*
- 2 tbsp. bacon drippings
- ½ cup crumbled cooked bacon or turkey bacon
- 1 large banana, finely chopped
Preheat your grill with waffle plates in place.
Meanwhile in a large bowl, combine flour, baking powder, sugar and salt; stir to blend. In a second bowl, beat eggs; blend in milk, butter and drippings. Add to flour mixture all at once and blend until just smooth. Stir in bacon and banana.
Pour 1½ cups batter onto the center of the waffle plates. Close the lid and bake about 8 minutes until the lid opens easily and waffles are golden.
Repeat with remaining batter.
Serve immediately with syrup, if desired.
*If desired, you can substitute margarine or canola oil for butter.
