How can you prevent food from sticking to a griddle? We will answer that along with many other questions about griddles here. A Blackstone griddle can cook anything to perfection.
You can cook eggs, pancakes, bacon, burgers, mushrooms, and hot sandwiches. With a griddle, the juices stay with your food and don’t drain away like when you use a grill. This makes the food especially tasty.
Nothing beats a griddle for outdoor cooking. Griddles are easier to clean than grills – there is a flat surface, so it’s not harder to clean than a frying pan. However, if a lot of food sticks to a griddle, it takes time to clean.
What are Blackstone griddles made of?
Blackstone makes outdoor griddles out of cold-rolled steel, which is very smooth. You won’t notice any bumps or dents on the surface if you look at it carefully.
A Blackstone griddle is smooth enough to appear perfect to the naked eye. Griddles also do an excellent job of heat distribution at a very even pace – all of your food will cook at the same speed, regardless of where you put it….for the most part.
Do You Need to Season a Blackstone Griddle?
When seasoning a griddle, you pour cooking oil on it and then heat it up to bake the oil into the surface. This gives the surface a protective coating. The coating prevents scratches, stops the food from sticking, and can improve the taste of your meals.
Seasoning is a good idea if you have a Blackstone. You don’t want to scratch it when you clean it or spend a long time cleaning it carefully. Get some soap, cooking oil / Blackstone conditioner, and paper towels, then season it to make it easy to clean.
For more on the seasoning process and reasons behind why we season a griddle, check out our article on Do You Need To Season A Griddle.
How Do You Keep Food From Sticking on a Blackstone griddle?
Proper care and maintenance of your griddle or flat-top grill will prevent food from sticking to your Blackstone griddle, following the steps below will ensure your Blackstone Griddle will stay non-stick and ready for use for years to come.
Season Your Griddle
Seasoning your griddle starts with a good first seasoning before you ever cook your first meal on the Blackstone Griddle. Additionally, cooking with good cooking oils such as flaxseed oil, grape-seed oil, avocado oil and olive oil do a great job of keeping that seasoning in good shape.
Clean Your Griddle Before and After Each use
With a Blackstone griddle, you should only use soap on it the first day you get it. Before you cook anything on the griddle, wash it down with water, and be sure to NOT use any soap.
The additives and properties of soap will strip away the years of built-up seasoning and oils and ultimately lead to your griddle sticking to food. After washing it down, you should season it. Don’t skip the seasoning process – seasoning is the right way to keep food from sticking.
How Do You Season a Blackstone Griddle?
First, you need the right materials, you can find a full breakdown here. You need a bucket of water, Blackstone Griddle Seasoning & Cast Iron Conditioner, tongs (to avoid touching hot metal), and soap.
If you do not want to get Blackstone Conditioner, you can use cooking oil instead. Cooking oil won’t work as well, but you can season a griddle with it.
The first thing you should do is clean the griddle. Put some soap in the bucket, wash the griddle well, and rinse it properly. Don’t leave any soap on the griddle, as the soap might end up in your food.
Next, you should blacken the griddle. Initially, the griddle will be a grey color. When you heat it up the first time, it will turn dark; this should take 10 or 15 minutes.
Next, you coat the griddle in either Blackstone Conditioner or cooking oil. Any of vegetable oil, olive oil, or shortening will work, but Blackstone Conditioner is the best choice. Be careful not to get burned at any point.
The oil coating should be thin. Use paper towels to spread the conditioner around. A little is a lot – it won’t work as well if you overdo it.
Next, turn the heat back up again to bake the oil into the metal. Leave it on for as much as 30 minutes and make sure the oil gets hot enough to turn to smoke. Repeat the last step a few times. Put a lot of oil or conditioner on your griddle and then burn it off more than once.
That sounds time-consuming, but you won’t have to do it again for a long time. After you season the surface two or three times, there will be an excellent non-stick coating on your griddle. You might use conditioner between cooks, but this is not always necessary.
What Makes Blackstone Griddles Good Products?
The heat controls for Blackstone griddles are reliable and accurate. If you are used to charcoal grills, you may be amazed by how controllable a gas grill is, see here. The knobs allow you to pick the right temperature for your food.
Blackstone griddles are portable
You can fold a Blackstone griddle up, so you can take it anywhere. You can easily fit even the larger griddles in a trunk if you fold them up. You can take a Blackstone griddle with you when you are camping or on vacation.
Multiple heating zones
The propane burners are powerful – they produce up to 60,000 BTUs of heat. The burners allow for multiple heat zones, so you can have a hotter temperature on one part of the griddle, read more here.
Cook a huge variety of food
Blackstone griddles will let you cook anything. You can cook shrimp and seafood, pasta, tacos, fish – all sorts of things if you think outside of the box. Griddles are not only for burgers and pancakes.
Restaurants use griddles for cooking food that keeps customers coming back. Steak or seafood cooked on a griddle has a distinctive taste that you won’t get from a grill.
Gas is better than electric
While an electric grill has some advantages, such as being usable inside, the heat is less even. If you cook two burgers on opposite ends of the griddle, one might be a bit raw or overcooked.
Another option is charcoal, which provides even heat, but you can’t control the temperature like you can with a gas griddle. Griddles coated in Teflon are not the best idea – Teflon is unhealthy to cook with at very high heat, and it scratches easily.
If electric griddles are your thing, check out our review of Blackstone’s new E-Series Electric Griddle.
Take care of Your Blackstone Griddle, and it will last you a long time
When you clean a Blackstone griddle, you are not supposed to use soap and water. Soap and water is not necessary to disinfect the griddle. You should only wash the griddle with soap the first day you get it.
Instead, clean your griddle with a scraper and cooking oil. You might also use sandpaper. You can use lemon juice to get rid of grime. After the initial seasoning, you may have to bake oil into your griddle again.
You may not have to do a full seasoning again, but you might bake oil into the griddle a single time between uses. Conditioner is better than oil if you want the best results.
