A few Christmas past, my mom gave me a George Foreman grill, one of the larger ones. I used it once in awhile.. in the summer I prefer the grill on my deck… and I’ve never cared for burgers on the GF. Maybe it’s the fact that you do lose so much of the fat? I dunno. Bout the same time I ended up with an electric griddle. It was handy, but when just cooking for myself it didn’t get used very often.

Awhile back, I saw that Cuisinart had what they called a “Griddler” It looks similar to the GF grills, but it doesn’t sit at a slant. What it looks more like I suppose is a panini press, one of those machines that just borders on being a uni-tasker that you might see Alton Brown throwing out the kitchen window. Both a panini press and a GF grill are what are often referred to as “contact grills”. They grill by direct contact heat to both sides of your food at the same time. Not that you couldn’t use a regular grill and just flip stuff over, but hey… anything to make things faster, right?

Well, there’s two things that caught my eye about the Griddler that makes it a step up from either a panini or GF grill. First, it flips open all the way to lay flat so you can do your regular style, open grilling. The second thing that was appealing about the Griddler is that you could take off the grill plates, swap them with flat griddle plates, and you’ve got a place to make pancakes, eggs, etc. But you pay for those extra features. Where you can find a decent GF grill, or a panini press in the $30-50 range, the Griddler goes for $120 and up depending on where you shop. Cheapest I saw was $110 on sale at Kohls awhile back.

I’d been waffling a bit on picking one of these up… the fact that the Kohl’s near me was out didn’t help. When I was running errands the other day, I was near another Kohl’s and decided to stop in and see what if they had one… unfortunately it was no longer on sale and was back up to their regular price of $150, but fortunately they were out. While glancing about through, I noticed they had another similar one.. Bella or something was the brand, and it was marked at about $110. Thing is, on the display model, the top plate was hanging loose. Not a very good marketing move, displaying a defective unit. No wonder they had about half-dozen of them on the shelf. As I looked at it closer, it seemed darn close to the Cuisinart in almost every way. But the broken plate was bugging me, so I passed.

On the way out I stopped at the Food Network display (I think Kohl’s has an exclusive on the FN products) and saw something I hadn’t seen at the Kohl’s by my house.. the 4-in-1 Grill Station. Again, the basic shape, design and function was the same as the Griddler, and it had flat and grill plates PLUS it had waffle plates. And as an even bigger bonus, it was marked down to $100. Didn’t take me long to decide to pick it up… and as another surprise, at the register it rang up at $80 plus tax.

Soo…. to shorten an already long story, I am now looking for a new home for both the GF grill and my flat griddle, and have broken in the Grill Station with a couple panini sandwiches and may have to try a burger or somthing on there later today. I’ve since read some mixed reactions to using the waffle plates, biggest complaint is that the wells are deep enough to make good waffles. However, I’m not much of a waffle person (specially these days), but I think tomorrow I’m going to try something I’ve been curious about.. doing frech toast in a waffle iron. I’ll let you know how it goes. The next biggest complaint, and one I agree with… is the thing doesn’t come with any sort of instructions or owner’s manual, just a couple of recipe cards. Yea yea yea… guys don’t read directions anyways, but still…?

Photo is a panini sandwich I made with my home-made bread, roast beef, provolone, shredded luttuce, garlic sprouts, spicy brown mustards, few dashes of my home-made hot sauce with a side of banana slices drizzled with cranberry dipping sauce.