Flat top griddles

texas blues

texas blues

I want this sooooooo bad.
I seen the 36" at Lowe's today for $299.00
 
I'm slightly worried about the 3/16" rolled steel thickness.
 
The 24" Imperial NSF certified natchel' gas I cooked on this past year was junk.
 
Put 3 each 8 ounce burgers on it and it would chill right down. Hated it.
 
I want something with balls that will take a shot at the title no matter if its a burger, hash browns, an omelette, or whatever I wanna' do.
 
Next to cast iron, a good flat top griddle is my go to. 
 
Anyone else cook on a flat top?
 
THP or mods please feel free to move this to an apropos forum as you deem.
 
Salute'
 
 
 
 
 
texas blues said:
I want something with balls that will take a shot at the title no matter if its a burger, hash browns, an omelette, or whatever I wanna' do.
Click to expand...
 
TB are you gonna be makin burgers? like BEEF burgers?
 
And Omeletts? wait. is this for work or the Blues Casa? 
 
Scoville DeVille said:
 
TB are you gonna be makin burgers? like BEEF burgers?
 
And Omeletts? wait. is this for work or the Blues Casa? 
Click to expand...
 
Nah its for me.
 
I don't want to spend $700.00 to a G on a used flat top that chills off after a dozen u-15's.
 
I want to be able to make smashed burgers with fine diced grilled onions.
 
And Tex-Mex sheeit.
 
And flat topped fish tacos.
 
In other words, just about any damn 'thang other than soup.
 
Well, my ¢2, dont buy that POS from Lowes that will frustrate you and 2 years later you want to throw it out.
 
Will you still love that thing in 2 years?
 
Scoville DeVille said:
Well, my ¢2, dont buy that POS from Lowes that will frustrate you and 2 years later you want to throw it out.
 
Will you still love that thing in 2 years?
Click to expand...
 
There's a reason why Lowe's rhymes with blow's.
 
The Amazon review' are stellar but there are heaps of complaint's about damaged shipping crap.
 
At Lowe's I can at least inspect it before I take it home and it's heaps cheaper than most other joints.
 
'Thang I wanna' know is...
 
Who else love's a flatgrill/griddle?
 
SoFlo knows some 'thangs.
 
I can rock some sheeit on a flat grill.
 
Just wondering.
I've worked a lot of kitchens in resorts and small town dives and bars.
ALL had flat tops that were the main means of cooking what they sold.

At the larger kitchens they all had someone come in earlier than the cooks etc. to just fire everything up.

Are they getting extinct or something?

I know a lot of the steam run stuff (steam chests) is/are extinct and the replacements suck.
The old ones were run off a boiler,equal to a presure cooker.
The electric ones don't get hot as fast etc.They sucked when I had to use them...

In prep Kitchens we made stuff so all the cooks had to do was toss a lot of the stuff on the flat top to heat it up for serving.

I can't imagine a kitchen without even one.
Especially for breakfast menus and most sandwich type lunch stuff,dinner menus weren't much different.

Even the small places I worked at.the flat top was their bread and butter.
I might have been lucky,but I never worked a flat top I didn't like...

We prepped prime rib but it was later cut up per order and heated up on the grill before serving.
Cook the bacon 3/4 of the way in the oven then put them in a pan to be crispened up per order on the flat top grill.

Only place I never saw a Flat top was in the steak house.

Old stoves used to have a small grill(gas stoves) that was great for pancakes etc.
What they were designed to do at the time for home use.
I see the new home kitchens with grills and all kinds of stuff these days.
Mini commercial type stuff.
Hell,Kitchen aid makes mixers that do everything with the attatchments.
I've got a 30 or so yr. old kitchen aid mixer that does everything,I have ALL the do dads.

Maybe I'm just too used to commercial kitchens or something.
Flat tops were never a problem.
Never had any problems with them with heat loss etc.

I don't know what brands the places had that I worked at but none needed more than to be turned on before the cooks came in,just like the steam tables and coffee makers.

Cleaned them with oil and a pomice stone every night,wipe them down with a rag, coat with clean oil and they were good to go.
Just like cast iron,if cleaned and oiled things NEVER stuck to the grill.

You could put a large pot of OG juice or whatever on them and keep it hot all day.

Largest place I worked was the Grand Canyon,South Rim(prepped for the scarf and barfs and restaurants and worked the AZ.Steak house).
Smallest was in Truckee Ca. and a beer bar in So. Cal.(a guy rented rented the kitchen out for lunches-food was so good he ended up buying a place of his own and is still doing great-we put out some great eats).

Never worked at a fast food place of any kind.
 
Good info and story there SM.
 
Flat top extinct?
 
Never!
 
If anything, I think they are as popular or more so than ever.
 
The Imperial flat top I was dissing, wasn't because it was a shabby build or brand. It was because it was old and poorly maintained, i.e. filthy. I could see underneath and notice many of the flame holes were clogged but I never had enough time to shut the thang down and yank it apart to clean it properly.
 
Variations on the flat top are numerous and go back a long way. I've seen everything to plancha's, more or less a slab of steel over an open pit, to disc cookers. In Mexico, cooks would take an actual farm implement disc and use that over a fire. It works great! Even a simple paella pan is more or less a version of the flat top.
 
One of the things that intrigue's me about the Blackstone I saw was that its not stainless steel as many are in restaurants. Just having a slab of plain old carbon steel allows for seasoning it like cast iron and one would never want to use a grill brick on one.
Wipe it down and its good to go and eventually it gets a nice smooth carbon layer that is virtually non stick.
 
I've been hot and bothered for a long while about getting a Big Green Egg but for the money, I can't justify it as I have other smokers and I don't really grill all that much any more. But a flat top grill!!! Now that's something I would use at least every other day. They're so damn versatile. 
 
Here's just another reason to have a flat top and why I want one in a bad way.
I can't watch that video with out damn near drowning in my own drool!
 
It's the juice you pour over Prime rib just before serving it.
A mixture of beef drippings from the prime rib mixed with basically onion soup.
We made the onion soup from scratch.
Simmered about 100lbs of onions overnight with assorted veggies and beef bones.
Drained off the liquid.
Put it back in the the steam kettle ,added meat juice from the prime ribs and chopped up onions and garlic and let it go on warm until the onions were just right.
Made 50-60 gal. at a time.
Served it in small crafts with a chunk of dry sourdough with cheese on top put under a broiler until the cheese was slightly brown.

Used the liquid (og juice)with Prime rib.
Dip the meat in it then a few seconds on the flat top and a little cup of it on the side..,
If some idiot wanted WELL DONE prime you dipped the meat in the juice before flipping the meat on the flat top to keep it from drying out.
Well done Prime-what a waste.Best served rare.

For Rare,you just let the meat sit in the OG juice to warm it up and served it...
I miss that prep kitchen.
20 prime ribs cooking all night long 2 times a week.Og juice in the kettle 3+times a week.
Whole Chickens and Ducks in the ovens...Life was good.

Jeez,I'd eat a couple orange ducks right out of the ovens for breakfast.We worked graveyard shift.
Stuffed the ducks with tangerines,onion and oranges for baking.
The juice in the pans was pure heaven after you strained off some of the fat(for future use),
Not to mention all the breads ,doughnuts and deserts cooking dayly.
 
Actually OG juce was probably changed from Au Jus(french).
Us Americans made OG the slang for Au Jus I think.

Might have also been that Erics accent made Au Jus sound to other kitchen staff soung like Og juice.
BUT I've heard the OG juice reference used in other places for au jus...
Maybe French Au Jus is different than our version ,I don't know.

With a head chef from Austria or Sweden,I forget which.
He didn't care for the French for some reason even though he went through different cooking schools there and a couple other European countries...

Eric knew his stuff,He'll forget more than most other cooks learn in their lifetime.

Now you know why I smoke mass quantities of stuff at a time.
Too hard to cook small amounts.
Thing is,other than prep,it doesn't matter the quantity of whatever you cook,it takes the same cooking time to do it right IN general.

I love opening up a full 6ft. X 3ft. freezer full of Vac Packed smoked goodies.
Heck ,if, lets say the DOG has nasty farts,just open my freezer for a few min.Apt. smells great again...
My farts smell like roses,musta been the dog. :)

Side note:
Burgers or cheese steak has to be Gods gift to the flat top
,But a crap load of onions,mushrooms and peppers or a bunch of REAL hash browns are right up there-Breakfast Burrito type stuff.Especially with Coffee brewing and Bacon frying.
Don't forget to put on a 1+in. plate sized Ham Breakfast steak.
Ham steaks are rare these days-the 1 inch thick ones anyway.Now if you hold them up to the light you can see through them and they are dry as heck,no matter how much melted butter and REAL maple syrup you put on them while cooking them on the flat top(syrup adds the brown bark and mapple/butter/pork fat goodness).

All have their special spot in Flat Top Heaven.

So many things come out good in a cast iron pan,BUT the same thing done on a flat top has that special something...
 
I throw the Lodge cast iron reversible grddle (flat side up) on top of the grill. What's the big deal? Shit works. And it's CI.
 
lodge_griddle.jpg

 
You afraid of charcoal?
 
Me afraid of Charcoal?
Afraid of cooking over wood,never. LOL

I guess you mistook my handle as I smoke a lot of tabacco or weed or?

God created wood so we could cook some great stuff over it.
Stuff like gas or whatever will never be able to do without wood added to the fire during the cooking process for grilling or Q.

I was talking about flat tops in commercial cooking kitchens and wondering if the flat tops I was used to were getting extict like the old steam kettles and chest are.
They are electric now,bad news,don't keep temps up evenly and are a general hard time to use.

In another post I posted my Lewis and Clark Camping set.
It has a similar grill.
But comparing it to a flat top is different.
Cooking over fire is an art all in itself.
More better!But still an art that some people can't learn or won't bother to learn.

Charcoal is only a fire starter to get wood going for the whole process.
Lump comes semi close but wood burned to coals then added to the Q is best.

Get your apples out of my basket of oranges. :)

There is something about,IN a commercial Kitchen,that a flat top does best.
Probably all the different things cooked on it the same day/time that adds to any specific thing.
If you heated up a chunk of pastromi,wiped the grill and tossed on some onions and a burgers,peppers or ?,some of whatever was cooked before adds to the flavor of everything they served that day.
It's not necessarily the flat top itself per say,it's the way it gets used probably on any given day.

I agree,a home flat top might not be like a commercial one and be no different than your cast iron skillet.
But I guess it depends on use to keep things in context.

My posts were about my use in commercial kitchens ,not home use.Never used a home flat top,only the old stoves that had the grill between the burners-years ago...
 
I loved cooking on a flat top, wanted one for home for many years. The extra area makes cooking lots of burgers etc so much easier.
 
The Hot Pepper said:
I throw the Lodge cast iron reversible grddle (flat side up) on top of the grill. What's the big deal? Shit works. And it's CI.
 
attachicon.gif
lodge_griddle.jpg
 
You afraid of charcoal?
Click to expand...
 
Not even close.
 
That is a gallant but still poor example of any representation of a flat top griddle.
 
And I love all 'thangs Lodge.
 
But not that one.
 
Are you guys talking about indoor or outdoor?

Cuz, if it's indoor, you might wanna think about upgrading your vent hood fan.

You can get large ones that are installed remotely in your attic (or other location) and make very little to no noise in the kitchen.
 
Scoville DeVille said:
Are you guys talking about indoor or outdoor?

Cuz, if it's indoor, you might wanna think about upgrading your vent hood fan.

You can get large ones that are installed remotely in your attic (or other location) and make very little to no noise in the kitchen.
Click to expand...
 
For the most part we're talking flat top griddles in general.
 
The one I am interested in would be an outdoor portable lp unit on wheels.
 
If you wanna be like Booma you gotta get the cool toys, so stop talkin', start buyin', and then postie those burgers and onions. No more research. Pony up!
 
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