Gas hob, two burners, and I want a griddle that spans both without a cold stripe down the middle. Budget is around $70 and it has to live in a cupboard, so I'm not entirely ignoring weight. The only two things it will ever do are Sunday pancakes for four and smashburgers. Does the thin steel plate really warp, or is that a thing people repeat?
Not a myth, I've done it. A thin steel plate across two burners gets heated in two stripes with cold edges, and after enough cycles mine developed a gentle dome in the middle — enough that oil ran to the edges and pancake batter pooled in a ring. Mass is what fixes hot spots on a domestic hob; my cast iron griddle is about 6 kg and takes ten to twelve minutes to come up evenly, but once it's there the surface is genuinely uniform. For your two jobs I'd take the slab and accept the preheat.
Check flatness before you buy if you can — lay a steel rule across it and look for light underneath. I've seen brand new cast iron griddles with a visible rock, and there's no fixing that at home.
Skip the nonstick griddle plates entirely, which is what I bought first. Smashburger temperature is well past what those coatings are meant to see, and mine started shedding within about two months. Cheap lesson but a lesson.
Same experience. Anything with a coating and a smashburger are incompatible hobbies.
Mild disagreement: those are two different tools you're trying to buy at once. Pancakes want responsiveness because you're constantly adjusting to avoid burning batter, and thin steel is lovely for that. Smashburgers want brute stored heat. If it genuinely has to be one purchase then yes, cast iron, but know that you're optimising for the burgers and living with a griddle that takes a quarter of an hour to be ready for six pancakes.
Cast iron slab, ten minutes on low then two on medium, oil thin. Cupboard space is the only real argument against, and 6 kg on a low shelf is fine.
@shimmer_sasha · 4mo ago
I measured mine with an infrared thermometer out of curiosity. On the cast iron griddle after a twelve minute preheat, the spread between the hottest spot over a burner and the coolest corner was small enough that I stopped rotating pancakes. On the thin steel plate after the same preheat the corners were dramatically behind and stayed behind. The other number that matters for smashburgers is recovery — you want the surface back up to temperature after the patty hits, and that is entirely a mass question.
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