Review of Hamilton Beach Premiere Cookware Electric Griddle

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List Price: $59.99
Sale Price: $41.35
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I bought this griddle to replace my Presto 07039 Professional 22-Inch Jumbo Electric Griddle when the Teflon coating wore out after years of use. There are some things on this Hamilton Beach griddle that are better than the Presto, and some that are worse. I just received it yesterday and tested it out with a batch of bacon. If I come across any problems or revelations in the future I will come back and change my review.

PROS:

Splash guard This is a great innovation and it was the selling point for me. My old Presto griddle would leave a big mess on the counter and wall behind it when I cooked anything greasy. Since I used it for burgers and bacon more than anything else, there was always a mess to clean on the counter after using it.

Warming tray I must confess that I haven't used it yet, but I pulled it out to see how hot it gets. It just stayed "warm," as it should. I am looking forward to making pancakes for guests with this griddle so I can test that drawer. With the old Presto unit, I would have to leave pancakes wrapped in a couple layers of aluminum foil to keep them warm.

Large cooking surface It seems to be about equivalent to the Presto.

Large grease trap It looks small, but for the amount of bacon I cooked in my test run the Presto unit's grease trap would have been full and this trap was only half full. I do think that it might turn into a problem if I am cooking a large amount of burgers or bacon on it, and in those cases I will just remove it and put a disposable pie tin under the griddle, just like I did with the old one.

Strong handles with lock washers This is better than the Presto unit by a long shot. They are sturdy cast aluminum handles with lock washers and I expect them to last a long time. The Presto unit had cheap "bakolite" style plastic handles and they constantly had to be re-tightened. The only down side to metal handles is that they heat up, so you have to use oven mitts to move the unit while it is hot.

Great non-stick surface It is very slick, and seems to be well applied to the unit. I don't foresee it peeling or cracking any time in the near future. The Presto unit had more of a textured Teflon coating, and things did stick to it. Nothing is going to stick to this griddle.

Very secure thermostat housing It really locks into place, whereas the Presto one just slid in and didn't really lock.

Fully submersible Just like the Presto unit, everything but the thermostat unit is fully submersible, which makes cleaning very easy.

High edges all the way around I thought the edges were pretty good on the Presto, but these are even higher. That helps when picking up food, and keeps stuff from spilling onto the counter.

CONS

Uneven heating I put bacon across the entire cooking surface, and I could literally see stripes on the bacon where the heating elements are. Eventually, the whole batch of bacon cooked evenly, so perhaps I should have preheated it longer. On the Presto unit, I preheated it for just a couple of minutes and it cooked evenly every time. This unit is definitely inferior in that regard. It also took a lot longer to cook a batch of bacon than the Presto unit did at the same temperature setting, so it could be that the Presto unit's temperature indication was high or this one is low. It is going to require some adjusting either in the temperature or preheat time.

Cooking surface not tilted This might make it easier to cook eggs, pancakes, or anything else that might run, but it also keeps grease from running into to grease trap. To get grease into the trap, you have to tilt the griddle. If you read my comments above, you know that it has nice metal handles, so you need an oven mitt to grab the handle and tilt it. Also, if the grease trap already has some hot grease in it, tilting the unit could cause that grease to pour out of the grease trap. I will get by this problem by just setting the grease trap on the counter below the holes, rather than sliding it into the drawer slides.

Overall, I think I will be happy with this griddle, but there are a couple of areas that could have been improved and a couple of things I will need to get accustomed to.

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My old electric non-stick griddle finally bit the dust, and I had to replace it pronto.I searched the internet for hours, and finally picked the Hamilton Beach Electric Griddle. Although it is not perfect, it is better designed and more attractive than many of the cheaper competitors. It has actual handles to move it when it is hot,and it has raised edges all around to prevent the grease from bacon or sausage to spill out on your counter top.I think that it is also one of the best looking units available. Grease drains through a hole to the grease trap underneath.I think that this unit is better than most of the cheaper brands out there.I am happy with it so far.

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A great griddle. Really good product. We have used it numerous times at our home already, and it has not disappointed us at all. Large and nice non-stick coating.

Honest reviews on Hamilton Beach Premiere Cookware Electric Griddle

After reading multiple reviews on about every sub-$50 electric griddle on the market, I decided to give this one a try, on the basis that it seemed to have the fewest significant problems of all products in that group (I was trying to avoid going up the next step to the >$100 products).

My wife and I tested this griddle as follows (after 15 minutes of preheating at 400 degrees):

* 4 strips of bacon cooked at 400 degrees, arranged in line with the long dimension of the griddle's surface, with one strip near each edge and two in the middle. Our thinking was that this would help us determine the evenness of the heat distribution, as the two outer strips of bacon would be over the heating element, while the two inner strips would be in the area between.

* 3 pancakes cooked at 400 degrees, arranged as follows: 1 pancake at the end farthest from the heat control, near the corner of the griddle's surface, 1 pancake in the middle of the griddle, and 1 pancake at the middle of the end nearest the heat control. Again, our intent was to test the evenness of the heat distribution.

* 2 fried eggs cooked at 350 degrees, both near the middle of the griddle's surface.

Our test results:

Bacon: The two inner strips of bacon took about 10-15% more time to cook than the two outer strips. My wife says that even the longest cook time was similar to our 20-year-old Presto griddle, and much faster than an Oster CKSTGRRM25 griddle we had tested last weekend. When she first put the bacon on the preheated griddle, her first impression was that it was cooking too fast at 400, so she turned the temperature down to 350. This drastically slowed down the cooking, however, so after less than a minute, she turned the temp back up to 400, finishing the cooking at this temp (she likes her bacon crispy, which requires a higher cooking temp). My wife declared herself satisfied with the results, despite the variation in cooking time.

Pancakes: The pancake nearest the heat control cooked the fastest, followed closely by the pancake at the far corner; the pancake in the middle lagged noticeably (taking an extra 45-60 seconds to cook). All pancakes cooked evenly (no stripes), and the total cooking time seemed to be about the same as our old Presto (but again much faster than the new Oster we'd tried). My wife again said this was satisfactory.

Eggs: I cooked the eggs; as I like to have fine control over how done the yolks are, I turned down the heat to 350. Both eggs came out very nicely and cooked in a reasonable amount of time.

General observations:

* When you take the griddle out of its box, watch out--the handles are on the outside of the styrofoam end caps, and are not held in with tape! Also, the 2 plastic trays slide around freely, and will drop out with little provocation. Be careful with the small parts while unpacking, lest anything hit the floor and break.

* Precleaning (and clean-up afterwards) were made a bit easier by the grease drains being on the end of the griddle surface farthest from the heat control plug. Propping the griddle on the divider in our double sink (with the drain holes at the low end) made for an uneventful clean-up.

* Setup was a bit frustrating; the handles each have to be attached with two machine screws. The first handle went on just fine, but on the second handle, the first screw I drove went in about 90%, then stopped cold (I was using a small electric screwdriver, with the torque set to maximum). I couldn't get the screw to go in any farther with a manual driver, so I then tried to back the screw out with the manual driver--neither attempt was successful. Apparently the screw hole was machined poorly, and the threads either didn't extend to the bottom of the hole (most likely, as that would explain why I couldn't back the screw out) or else the hole wasn't the proper depth. I had to use a manual driver and a lot of force to get the screw to about 95% (at which point the Phillips screw head was stripping out). Hoping that the second screw would tighten up all the way and keep the handle stable, I was immediately frustrated by that screw's not going in at all. Upon close examination, I found that the screw threads were partially filled with metal near the tip of the screw--that screw was going nowhere! Fortunately, I have a tap and die set, so I attempted to rethread the screw. Again I was frustrated, as the screws are apparently some odd metric size, and my dies were all SAE. Having little choice at this point (I wasn't going to be able to disassemble the handle, anyway, because of the stuck screw), I chose the best available die size (#10 fine thread--at least the thread pitch matched) and rethreaded the tip of the screw. This allowed the screw to at least enter the hole, at which point the threads engaged and the screw drove in normally. I'm putting this all down to the lack of adequate machining processes and quality controls at the Chinese manufacturing facility--it's consistent with other screw/hole problems I've been hearing from retail shop owners about Chinese products (i.e., they see a much higher rate of returns for this very reason).

* The non-stick surface worked well--even the harder "scum" left by the bacon cleared easily with a push of a nylon spatula, and all of the food released easily, even the eggs. Note that no "seasoning" was directed or apparently required, nor did we precoat with vegetable oil--a little bacon grease did all of the work (and that probably only added flavor, not affecting the food release).

* As others have noted, the handles get hot--too hot to touch, really. This is an unfortunate design deficiency--there is a thermal isolation pad between the griddle's body and the handles, but the thermal isolation doesn't include the screw holes in the handles. Consequently, there's a thermal path available from the griddle body through the screws to the handles! Dumb, dumb, dumb. I will be looking for some silicon tubing (or something similar) to place permanently over the handles before someone (probably a guest or visiting family member) gets burned.

* The grease tray is adequately-sized. The presence of two drain holes (rather than the usual one) may help, though there was no attempt to channel the grease to the holes by making the grease channel slant down to the holes. Consequently, it helps to use a corner of a spatula to push the grease remnants to the holes and into the grease tray when you're done cooking.

* The warming tray is generously-sized; it could hold 4 5" pancakes (tested), and may be deep enough to hold 6. It seemed to do the job of keeping the pancakes warm (for about 5 minutes, while the eggs were cooking).

* The griddle surface has a high, thin edge all the way around. I liked this better than the low, thick edge I've experienced on our old Presto, both for keeping food on the surface (though the non-stick released food so easily that I never really had anything "jump" and try to escape over the side) and for cracking eggs (that's always easier with a thin edge).

Bottom line: For the price, this one's a keeper. We'll live with the lack of perfect heat distribution (that's endemic with the sub-$50 griddles, from what I can tell, with the possible exception of the Oster we tried--it had a serpentine heating element rather than a simple loop). The hot handles are a greater concern, but I expect that I'll be able to find something to cover up the metal where you'd normally grab the handles (which you'd do only to move the griddle around on the counter top while cooking, anyway, which shouldn't happen too often). We'll see how well this one lasts, and whether it comes close to the 20+ year span of our old Presto (which had a much thicker, heavier griddle surface than the current Presto models, in case you're wondering; I'd have been tempted to keep that one if the replacement heat control we'd have needed hadn't cost as much as a new griddle and had bad reviews for reliability). That said, if our finances hadn't been so tight, I'd have been sorely tempted to pony up the money for a more expensive griddle with no compromises (such as the Broilking Professional PCG-10 Electric Griddle With Backsplash).

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Great value. Love the back splash, it helps prevent grease from splattering on the counter. Easy to clean since it's submersible. Cooks evenly.