Category: Grub Garage
If this topic has ever been created I'm sorry for the duplicate. anyway, here's a place to share all thigs related to using these nifty small appliances. I just got myself a small one the other day and am looking at diffferent recipes to try. If anyone has recipes to pass along, definitely feel free to share. Have fun.
I don't have any specific recipes, though I do have a bit of a caution:
If you cook chicken on one of these, it tends to dry out a bit, no matter what you do with it. And if you cook sausages on it, you may need to butterfly them. If you don't, then you may end up with a slightly crispy outer casing in order to make sure the inside cooks thoroughly.
This piece of kit can really make an easy grilled-cheese sandwich though. Works like a charm.
I use mine for bacon and sausages and it works fine, but for other stuff I use my electric skillet or the oven for the most part.
Yeah, I noticed with chicken breasts, it would taste half cooked on the inside with a hard outside, but everything else, it seems to cook ok. I would like to learn some recipes too. I don't have any.
Eeewww. Yeah, I pretty much always do the shake 'n' bake thing for chicken.
so I'm not the only one who 1. loves the George forman. 2. But..can never get my chicken breast just right!! So annoying! How long do you cook bacon on it? I've also heard do not use something metal to take the food off of it cause the metal does something to the grilling surface. Use plastic spatula or spoon something like that
Five or six minutes. Maybe ten if it's not thawed.
Bacon from frozen will take about eight to eleven minutes depending on how crispy you like your bacon.
Chicken is honestly better baked, or else you're apt to dry it out. If it doesn't taste cooked in the middle, that's...not good. You can get sick fron pork and chicken that aren't properly cooked, so watch yourself with that.
Alsoo, regarding the metal being hard on the grill...I think as long as you're fairly gentle it's okay. I've used a plastic spatula to lift burgers off the grill, but I've also used a butterknife when one was handy...slid the blade in flat underneath something and just flipped it up. My grill is fairly old, but I don't think it's horribly scratched or anything.
is there a way to make sure chicken is thoroughly cooked on this thing? making a grilled cheese sandwich later on it for lunch.
Not really unless it's chicken fillets or something.
As far as the chicken being cooked in the middle, I bought a cooking temp. thing that tests the tempiture of stuff. I just look up the temp. chart online. Also, you can stick a fork in the center..that works to I think.
I use mine for burgers and such. Mines one of those that is well, probably old too but it still does the job, but it's not one of those that heats up whenever you plug the thing in, and you don't have to be extremely careful cleaning it. Mine has the removeable plates that you can put in the dishwasher, pluss, it also beeps. It came in handy for me when I was at the now closed reach center for the blind in tupelo since they only had one just like mine and one of the very first ones that I absolutely hated that I had to use at first. Thought i'd never get that damn thing cleaned! But anyway, yeah, we used mine for burgers and we also did porkchops and even did some fish.
Very cool! Nice! Fish...it's good but I get so paranoid about undercooking stuff.
I'm glad I found this thread. someone mentioned about an electric skillet. I'm thinking about getting one but I don't know about it. Could someone describe it and if its blind user friendly and maybe a breef description on how to use it? thanks.
I use to have one and agree with the chicken comment, also, I oculd never get steaks to work on them properly. But they're great with sausages as someone else has said, and chops, and sandwiches.
My mom had gotten me an electric ... actually, now that I think about it, I'm not sure if it was a skillet or a grittle. Either way, I couldn't use the blasted thing because finding a way to make the temperature part accessible through tactile marking was impossible. so I gave it back to her.
I hope I could find a good one some day soon.
I marked the temperature dial on my skillet with little blobs of glue from a hot glue gun.
wow, finding this thread makes me glad! I got my George forman from the voc rehap program I went to last summer and was also looking for recipes. Well lesson learned, don't cook chicken on the forman. :p
A few thoughts.
One, george foreman's will never do whole meats well. That is chicken, steak,
that sort of thing. They will always come out dryer because of how the grill is
designed. If you squeeze the meat, you will lose the juices. That's why your
chicken breasts are drying out. You're squeezing an already dry piece of meat.
As for griddles and that sort of thing? First, you want it to have a big slab of
metal. Aluminum is good because it heats up quickly without a lot of weight.
Make sure that metal is thick though. The bigger the slab, the more even the
heat, and the faster the recovery time for the griddle. That means it'll heat back
up faster after you've cooked one burger or whatever. As for the knobs, just find
one you can make accessible. some you can, some you can't.
re, electric skillet:
PinkStrawberry, mine is the Presto 16 inch fold-away, which you can find on Amazon. I bought it about four years ago, so I'm sure it's still available, or one similar.
Target and Walmart and the like seem to have different models, and none that fold. The folding part is just the base that the skillet piece sits on, so it's still not greatly compact for storage, if that matters.
You can get an 11-inch model, although when I read reviews, the 11 inch was said to have uneven heating across the skillet's surface, so I went with the 16, which is quite large. But this also makes it easy to work with spatula or tongs for turning meat, or stirring.
The skillet is nonstick, and super easy to clean; just treat it as you would any nonstick pan. It has higher sides than most traditional stovetop skillets.
The thermostat piece plugs into the side, and completely detaches, which I always do when I'm finished cooking.
As for marking the dial, and it is a twist dial, I just put one of those sticky dots--whatever they're actually called--on the dial itself, or you could put a scratch on it, as that won't ever come off. I set the temperature based on this:
all the way counter clockwise is off
dot at 3 o'clock is warm
5 o'clock is about 200 degrees
dot at 7 o'clock is 325
end of dial is 400 degrees
If you need more tips, I can give you the guidelines from the manual, as to what temp is best for cooking most meats and a variety of other foods.
There are a couple of cook books from NLS that are dedicated electric skilllet recipes, if you're a person who likes to have specific instructions.
It's not the newest up to date and coolest gadget, but I love mine.
thanks, violet. :)
I wanna get a forman with the removeable plates, but from what I've heard the coating on them has been linked to cancer.
Everything's been linked to cancer at one point it seems. And then it isn't.
But ya never know.