If you end up not being able to cope with a range of temps, just heat it up in a 500* oven for twenty minutes or so and put it over two hobs set on simmer. Then get your cooking done. Warning: you might still have to move food around the griddle a little bit. From where I’m from, that’s called cooking, but it seems to have gone out-of-style on Hungry Onion.
You can also, gasp, move the griddle itself around, or turn the hobs off and cook on stored heat for a few minutes. Again, this weird activity called cooking. You might actually have to stand in front of your stove and watch what’s happening, believe it or not.
I also cook “pancakes” one at a time, in a round pan, and call them crepes. Admittedly thinner than what you might find at a truck stop. Silly me. Where on Earth did I come up with that idea?
Agreed. You can keep stuff in motion. I love thin pancakes. A cup of flour, a egg, 3/4 tsp of baking powder, 1/2 to 3/4 tsp. of salt. , splash of vanilla, couple of tbsp. of turbinado sugar, a cup and a quarter, maybe more, of milk. Makes a couple of cakes 8-10" by 1/8". Maple syrup.
Won’t wheels make the stove too tall? How will the griddle be anchored. Will I need to replace my grates more often? Can stove drift turn into thread drift?
LOL!! creative thinking. Checking it out on the Made In page, looks well made. Most pictures have it atop a grill there. I’m sure it would work on a grill, but I gotta say, this $10 grill pan I got from Aldi kicks arse.
You can actually use the handle. Cleans in a jif. The handle is CI, but I don’t think the cooking surface is coated with anything. I’m guessing the surface is CI or CS, because, when I’m done cooking, I clean it hot, much like CI/CS. Just hit it with (hot) tap water when it’s hot, and most gunk comes right off.
Either way, I love the thing. Unlike the Made In, the cheapo is perforated, which I love. I usually only grill with a Smokey Joe, so I couldn’t use the Made In by virtue of size; but I love my little Aldi grill roaster. Don’t know if I’d lay $170 down for it; but I’m guessing it’s pretty sturdy of Ipsedixit likes the hell out of it. For indoor use, I’d use plug in the old electric I always used when we had company. Outdoors, I’ll use the Blackstone flat top.
They are. We used to get such cakes at the Historic Anchor Inn in Lincoln City, OR. It took awhile to replicate them, and couple of tweaks followed: more salt, turbinado sugar, and vanilla.
I know this is the cookware thread and there is great reverence for certain cookware. I move stuff around and fiddle with the flame all the time, even with tinned copper. It is about optimizing heat, oil, and the shape of the food. Once the food is in the pan you really need to stay put. This is a reason I wish my small kitchen could handle a six burner stove. It just isn’t in the cards.
Thank you. This is what I want to see in a cooking video; not someone grunting and moaning mmmmmmmm. I learned something. Having taught for 20 years, I still crave learning… almost everything.
I often wonder if a lot of people are scared the bottom of their cookware might accidentally show signs of use – of having been moved around, etc. Buy equipment you aren’t afraid to use. The food is more important than the pots and pans. The tail is wagging the dog if you live in constant fear of scratching, warping, and denting pots and pans. I’m not suggesting abuse, let me be clear. This is why I’ve always been a proponent of decent restaurant supply pots and pans. You aren’t paying for expensive advertising, chef endorsements (they don’t do it for free), and boutique retail locations. Time spent polishing copper would be better spent perfecting a technique or a sauce, etc. If your favorite cookware brand advertises new, fashionable colors and you find this enticing it might be time to rethink things.
These people will fabricate a flat top to fit your range. Of course, you can use pots and pans on the flat top if you want to. You’re the cook. They’re not just for frying bacon, eggs, and making pancakes. Burners set on different strengths underneath the flat top result in a range of temperatures that you might find useful.
The reason to fiddle with and move cookware is necessity. Better cookware reduces the necessity. Poorer cookware increases it.
Hot spots and unevenness are rarely virtues. They should not be confused with zone cooking, which in reality is just setting different heats for different purposes and having them at the ready.
Having smooth and even heat is quite useful in griddles. Not having it means having unevenly cooked food.
Mastering the jiffypopping and funiculation bad equipment entails may be admirable, but they’re workarounds.
An interesting take. I enjoy cooking on flattops, but a very hefty piece of steel pretty much demands enough unevenness that it can be used as zones. A thick chunk of steel will be slower than many modern pans to respond to changes to the heat source. That significant lag in heating, and the perhaps more importantly, cooling is easily managed by simply moving the food to a cooler zone. If there were no zones, things would either need to be lifted or suffer the consequences. I think there are times when unevenness in a pan is helpful, but I also like responsiveness, quick heating and cooling. If the pan is sufficiently responsive, any benefits of unevenness seem much less important. It is hard (for me) to think in terms of zones when the hot spot is small and a few cm from the sweet spot, yet as I hover over the pan, those few cm become very important. All in all the evenness and responsiveness considerations sort of get nudged aside when cooking. I noticed Marco made his tomato sauce in ECI.
When I used to hire cooks for my restaurants, we’d always give them a trial period, and one of the key things I’d look for is how they used and cared for the woks.
Did you see that these things are 3/16" thick? That’s under 5mm, which is a far cry from the 25mm in commercial flat top griddles. Did you see the FLIR image? While this large 4.8mm griddle might be marginally more even than ipse’s 4.0mm Made In, it will still be too cool between the hobs to cook over the whole surface. From a temperature standpoint, the cook would be better off having one frypan on each hob.
And THAT is the dirty little secret of home griddles on most home cooktops–the chief benefit you’re getting is just a larger surface for access.
