Dry Rubs on Indoor Electric Grills

Dry rub pork topped with a colorful fruit salsa

Tips & Tricks: Using Dry Rubs on Your George Foreman Grill

Yes, you can use dry rubs to season food on your George Foreman grill! Although we’ve mentioned it in a few posts, we’ve had a few questions recently on whether dry rubs actually work on an indoor electric grill. While you might think that you can’t use them, because the dry ingredients would burn that close to the heat source, in truth, dry rubs come out looking great and tasting phenomenal from your George Forman grill.

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Maintaining Nonstick Grill Surface

Tips & Tricks: Maintaining your George Tough™ Nonstick Cooking Surface

A few months ago, we did a Feature Focus post on the benefits of our George Tough™ nonstick coating that comes standard on any George Foreman cooking surface. A few comments we received came from people having issues with their surface, so we wanted to do another post specifically directed at maintaining your nonstick surface properly.

In this post, we review all of the tips and tricks that will help extend the life of your product by maintaining the nonstick surface. Everything from placing and serving on the plates, to how best to wash is covered, so you can get all the information in one place. If you’re still having issues maintaining your finish, we recommend calling our Customer Care line at 1-800-231-9786.

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Letting Steak Rest

Steakhouse Mysteries Solved: Why do you let steak rest?

Have you ever gotten a really good cut of steak, cooked it to what you thought would be perfect and then been less than thrilled with the juiciness of the meat on your finished plate?

The problem could be that you’re not letting your steak rest prior to cutting and placing on your dinner plate. Although it seems like a small detail – and an extremely easy one to miss when you’re hungry and ready to start dinner – it can mean the difference between an average meal and an exceptional one. › Continue reading

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Making Great Grilled Chicken

Hot on the Grill: Making Great Grilled Chicken

Cooking chicken correctly will yield exceptionally juicy results

One of the most common and perhaps least raved about meats on the grill is the chicken breast. It is a staple of the average weekly menu plan in many homes, but it’s also typically considered one of the least exciting. In truth, though, chicken can be a flavorful, juicy main course – so why the bad rap?

Most of the trouble comes in the fact that chicken can be easy to cook wrong, so often people are judging the meat based on their experience eating it. However, if you cook chicken correctly, your opinion of it may start to drastically change and chicken night just might become one of your favorite meals of the week.

The first key to cooking chicken correctly is to take care with the cuts before you put them on the grill. Trim all the fat for healthier cooking; then, make sure all of the breasts or pieces are the same size – preferably from the center to the ends on each piece as well. As mentioned in our last post, having different thicknesses of meat will mean that the thin parts dry out while the thicker parts are still cooking. Even thickness ensures even cooking.

The next step is to carefully monitor cooking progress to ensure that you’re not overcooking. Chicken is extremely easy to dry out, so once it’s cooked it needs to be taken off the grill immediately to keep it moist, juicy and delicious. Obviously follow the recommended cooking times in your Use & Care and use them as a guide, but you need to monitor the cooking progress as well since the cuts might be thicker or thinner than what was used.

A meat thermometer is a huge help in making sure you don’t dry your chicken out, because you can check the temperature and simply remove once it hits 165°F – the FDA’s recommended internal temperature on chicken. If you don’t have a meat thermometer on hand, you can do a touch test, but this is definitely more of an art than a simple thermometer check. To touch test, simply press on the center of the breast; it should be firm, but not hard – hard means that you’ve overcooked.

If at all possible, use one of the two methods above to avoid slicing into the breast to check the center for pinkness. Once you slice the breast, juices will run and the chicken will dry out if you have to put it back on to cook longer. This is true for all meats, but can be especially problematic for chicken, since it dries out so easily.

Between cutting your pieces correctly and monitoring cooking progress closely, you should be able to get a really well cooked piece of chicken without a lot of extra work. Even without any extra marinades or sauces, you should notice a difference in the taste of the chicken itself and find it a lot more appetizing. If you’re still less than wowed, the best thing you can do is add a marinade or a rub to provde some extra imparted flavor to the meat.

If you decide to go this route, try to avoid anything that uses salt, as this is a big contributor to drying meat out as it cooks. If you use salt at all, using it extremely sparingly – again, it’s better if you can leave it out entirely. For marinades, always give at least a few hours for the chicken to marinate in the fridge (6-8 hours is the ideal). You want to let chicken marinate for a long time because the liquid needs time to work into the deep tissue; otherwise, your marinade might not provide the bold flavor you were expecting. For rubs, as is typical, you want to do the rub just prior to cooking to avoid drying the meat out – even when it doesn’t use salt.

Once you’ve pretreated your chicken to your taste, you will still need to follow the first two suggestions above to achieve the results you want. The chicken will be good itself, with the seasoning simply adding more flavor.

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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.

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