After a year of neglect, my grill needed some serious love. The grates, in particular, were so built up with char and rust that I decided to chuck ‘em and buy a whole new set, much to my chagrin. But this time, I decided to try out GrillGrates; I’m never using anything ever again.
The standard grates that came with your grill are probably stainless steel or cast iron, and they’re most likely fine. But a GrillGrate does a few things differently.
First, they’re made of anodized aluminum, which means these suckers absorb heat like nobody’s business—so you get really even heat distribution across the grates, with less flame required, and absolutely perfect sear marks. They also have troughs in between each rail, which keeps a lot of the drippings from falling onto the burners below and causing flare-ups. While it doesn’t eliminate flare-ups entirely, I have noticed significantly fewer since I started using them.
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Here’s something else cool: you can flip them over to use them griddle-style, if you want a more even crust along the whole burger, steak, or whatever else you’re cooking.
To figure out what size you need, just measure the front-to-back length of your current grill grates, and select the correct size GrillGrate to match. They come in 5.25-inch wide panels, in lengths from 12 inches all the way up to 24 inches. There are smaller 2.3-inch-wide gap panels in each size in case your grill’s width doesn’t quite fit a full panel at the end.
So, on my 15” x 25” grill, I’d need five 15-inch GrillGrates to fill the entire surface—though I started with half that (two 15-inch panels and one 15-inch gap panel) since I didn’t know how I’d like them. They make them for a number of round kettle grills as well—just browse their Amazon store if you can’t find a specific size (their generic brand name makes it a bit hard to search for the size you want, in my experience—you get a lot of results for other grill grates).
Alternatively, if you want to save some money, you can get smaller panels and put them on top of your regular grates. This is nice because you can transfer them to any other grill you might buy in the future, or bring them to a friend’s house or campground. I haven’t used them this way myself, though.
Lastly, I highly recommend grabbing the GrateTool, which is a spatula that fits between the rails for really easy flipping, and the Grate Valley bristle-free brush for cleaning. (I didn’t even order the Grate Valley brush, they either threw it in my order accidentally or there was some promotion I missed—but it fits the grates perfectly, as you’d expect.) The company’s YouTube channel has some good videos on how best to clean them (though it should be pretty self-explanatory if you’re already a grill expert), and the pamphlet that comes in the box details how to season them with an onion before your first use—something I highly recommend to avoid sticking.
They aren’t as cheap as my grill’s original replacement grates, but they’re so much better, they’re easily worth the price. I’m never going back.
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