High taste - low fat!! (George Foreman Grills)

Member Name: SusanLesley

Product:	George Foreman Grills
Date:	27/06/02 (1903 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good tasting food, Low fat food, Easy to clean

Disadvantages: None that I know of

Let me set the scene for you. We are moving house, hopefully next Friday 5th July. We are moving into a three storey ex guesthouse in Llandudno and my parents will have the ground floor as a 'flat' and Dave and I will have the upper two floors. Are you all following me so far?

Well, when we move in, there will be work needed to make the living accommodation as separate as possible, as we all need our space. We will need to put an en suite bathroom downstairs for mom and dad and we will need a kitchen upstairs. You can see where I'm going with this now can't you? As we want to make sure that mom and dad are OK first our kitchen will be put on hold for a while.

It won't be a problem as I can obviously go downstairs and use mom's kitchen whenever I want to but I do like to be independent, and anyway a 'make do' kitchen sounds like fun to me. I'm strange like that! OK there's no need to agree with me!

I thought about the appliances that we already have - a microwave, juicer, breadmaker, kettle, slow cooker and deep fat fryer (rarely used!). I then thought about the types of meals we enjoyed and realised we were a couple of things missing. We bought a toaster, which will stay in its box until we move, so the opinion on that will be along later! LOL! But, we couldn't decide about grilling things, should we have one of those two rings hotplates and get the frying pan out in the short term? Not a good idea as we're trying to loose weight, but what was the alterative?

Then I read an opinion on a rival site (naughty, naughty!) about the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Reducing Grilling Machine (and try saying that after a tube of wine gums!) I will refer to it during the rest of this opinion as the grill or I will be here all day!

I had already read one or two opinions about these and hadn't really taken much notice, but this one came at just the right moment and I realised that this
would fill the gap in our new kitchen so to speak and still provide us with healthy food.

Off we went to Comet to investigate. I was surprised at the range of these grills; there were 5 or 6 of them from the tiny ones which were more like little sandwich toasters to the big indoor/outdoor grill that I had seen advertised on TV.

We needed something that would be big enough to use when we had guests, but not so big that it took up the whole work surface! So we opted for the largest of the 'standard' grills for indoor use only. It is about the size of a large dinner plate and is a roughly circular construction with two decent sized oblong (ish) grooved grilling surfaces inside (one top, one bottom) and it cost us £59.95.

I must just tell you that when we called the sales assistant over to ask him if they had one in stock he asked if we wouldn't rather have the large indoor/outdoor one instead. We said that we didn't want it, but he then started to tell us how it would sit on the work surface and we could take it outdoors, etc. It took us a few minutes to convince him that we wanted the one that we had chosen! Maybe he was on commission?

When we got home we just had to try it out didn't we? I had defrosted some chicken breasts ready for tea and grilling them seemed like an ideal way to test the new toy. The assistant who sold me the grill told me that I would be able to use it to cook chicken from frozen, but I always like to defrost chicken and turkey thoroughly before I start cooking, so I won't be trying that.

I unpacked the grill and then sat and read the instruction book. Yes, me, reading the instructions first! I usually try and do things without reading the instructions and then find that I have made a mess of whatever it is I am supposed to be doing!

Following the instructions I placed the grill on the kitchen work surface, opened it up and wiped the inside surfaces with a damp cloth
to make sure that they were clean before I began cooking.

I then wiped the surfaces with a piece of kitchen roll onto which I had poured a tiny amount of cooking oil. I positioned the drip tray at the front of the machine and there it was, all set to start.

I plugged it in, switched it on and set the timer to 5 minutes and the temperature to full and pressed the start button to heat up the grill.

I must just stress at this point that once the grill has been switched on it must always be handled wearing oven gloves, as it gets extremely hot.

Inside the instruction book is a list of things that can be cooked in the grill together with their respective cooking times on full heat for rare, medium or well done.

When the 5 minutes had elapsed the machine beeped four times and switched itself off.

I opened the machine and place my chicken breasts on the lower grooved grilling surface and then closed the upper surface down to meet it, thus enclosing the chicken between the two heated surfaces.

I reset the timer for 12 minutes and checked occasionally that the chicken was OK, turning it once, using the plastic spatulas provided, so that I got a chequered pattern on it - now that is sad isn't it? To eat it I put each piece into warmed pitta bread with some home made coleslaw and it was delicious.

Very little fat ran out of the chicken, along the grooves of the grilling surface and into the drip tray, as chicken is not fatty meat. However, the resulting taste was lovely. The chicken was succulent and not dry at all, which can be a problem with chicken.

Cleaning the machine is easy too, and that makes a change for these new gimmicks doesn't it? I just had to wait until the grill had cooled and wipe it over with a damp cloth, no problem.

Obviously being a non-stick surface you are advised not to use anything abrasive to clean it or anything metal to turn the food on it as it will sc
ratch the surface and render the non-stick qualities useless.

OK so chicken doesn't have a high fat content so we decided to try sausage sandwiches for breakfast this morning. Again this was simplicity itself to cook and there was very little fat in the drip tray as the sausages were low fat ones. The taste was again superb!

For lunch today I have just cooked two haddock steaks in batter straight from the freezer and we have eaten them with salad. This time the drip tray did actually get used, as the batter tends to be quite high in fat, but the fish tasted gorgeous. In fact it was much nicer than it is if I cook it under the conventional grill, as this tends to make it taste quite dry.

The grill can also be used to cook certain fruits and vegetables as well the obvious things like chops, steaks, etc., so I am looking forward to trying that too. There are one or two recipes in the back of the instruction book to give you some ideas of what you can cook on your new grill too.

I noticed in the instruction book that it can be used to cook mince and as I always sweat the fat off mince before I use it to make my Chill Con Carne I think this will be the next challenge! I bet that'll make good use of the drip tray!

This will certainly be a Godsend when we move house with our makeshift kitchen but I can also see it being used a lot once the kitchen is complete. It will be so easy to cook a healthy cooked breakfast for guests as well as being able to have a stock of steaks, chicken breasts etc., in the freezer for quick but healthy meals when we come back from a day on the beach!

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