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While you'll ultimately get beautiful results from this grill, in our tests, it took 10 minutes to cook six burgers and 20 minutes to grill salmon.
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Food comes out almost as well as if you used an outside grill. Its lid helps to hold in heat and speed up cooking while containing the smoke and cooking odors.
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Written bySharon Franke, Cooking tools maven and former professional chef in NYC.
Updated April 11, 2024
When you’re craving a grilled steak and you don't have access to a great outdoor grill, your thoughts may turn to an indoor grill.
These countertop appliances can either have wide, open grates like outdoor grills, or covers that press down, cooking both sides at once. The latter, often called contact grills, were made popular for healthy cooking by the George Foreman Grill in the mid-1990s, and are great for making diner-quality crunchy grilled cheese sandwiches.
The best of both types will grill up a burger and cook meat that tastes like summer. While you can make a mean hamburger or sirloin with flavorful browning and crusting with the equipment you already own—a skillet and a stove—you’ll appreciate the versatility of an electric grill.
The best electric grill we tested is the Cuisinart Griddler Deluxe
(available at Amazon for $138.13)
. It's packed with features and can be used as a contact or an open grill—and even as a griddle.
Credit:
Reviewed / Jackson Ruckar
The Cuisinart Griddler Deluxe is the best indoor grill we tested.
Best Overall
Cuisinart Griddler Deluxe
Although large and pricey, the Cuisinart Griddler Deluxe offers a lot of cooking options for your money. In addition to being used as a closed grill, the two sides open up to form two separate surfaces for those times when you want to increase the number of burgers you can grill at once from six to 12.
The plates are reversible with a grill pattern on one side and a flat surface on the other. With both sides open and the flat surface in place, the Griddler Deluxe turns into a griddle, although there is a gap between the two halves that limits the number of pancakes you can cook at once. But, all in all, this is a very versatile product.
The Griddler browns quickly and evenly. Longer cooking items like paninis and chicken breasts came out crispy with beautiful grill marks. Using the high heat sear function, burgers were grilled perfectly.
In addition, this Cuisinart has lots of special features. You can select different temperatures for each plate, which is particularly helpful when it’s in the open position. You can cook the bacon on medium on one side and scramble the eggs on low on the other.
During preheating, the knobs glow red, then change to green when the selected temperature is reached. An innovative lever on the side of the machine allows you to adjust the distance between the two plates so that you can avoid crushing your burgers, but not so hard that all the cheese in a grilled cheese oozes out.
The plates are particularly easy to snap in and out and can be washed in the dishwasher. In the back of the grill, a drip tray slides into place. Not only is the manual thorough, it contains recipes that you'll actually want to prepare.
The Zojirushi Indoor Electric Grill is a great open-facing option for indoor grillers.
Best Open-Facing Grill
Zojirushi EB-CC15
Although it takes a little more patience than a contact grill, you can achieve delicious results with this indoor grill. In our tests, it took 10 minutes to cook six burgers and 20 minutes to grill salmon. That may not sound long, but it’s more than twice the time most of the closed grills needed. However, food emerged fully cooked with sought-after grill marks.
Even though it doesn’t have a lid, we didn’t notice much smoking during grilling. The Zojirushi model is large and will take up quite a bit of space on the countertop, in the dishwasher, and in a cabinet or closet if you’re going to stash it away between uses.
If you’re dead set on an open grill, our first choice is the Hamilton Beach Searing Grill with Lid Window, which is big enough to cook six hamburgers at a time. Burgers, chicken, and fish came out with deep grill marks closely resembling the ones you get from your outdoor grill.
The lid doesn’t press down on food, but rather it helps to hold in heat to speed up cooking a little and also contain smoke and cooking odors. The grill grate and the drip pan are dishwasher safe and the lid comes off for hand washing.
The Breville the Perfect Press is small, beautiful, and with no temperature control settings, uncomplicated to operate. Although it’s primarily intended for panini, it can easily handle three burgers or chicken breasts.
The plates have a flat surface so you don’t get any grill marks and you can’t remove them for cleaning. While not being able to rinse them under running water may bother you if you’re a cleaning fanatic, they wipe clean easily, and removing and reinstalling the plates is one less thing to worry about.
But my biggest gripe is with Breville’s "crush control" feature, which is supposed to prevent you from pressing down too hard on sandwiches, but it couldn’t adjust to evenly rest on a thick panini and as a result, the paninis I made didn’t come out evenly browned. As the plates lock together, the unit can stand up vertically when it’s not being used and there’s cord storage in the bottom which makes this product handy to store.
Like the Griddler Deluxe, the Cuisinart Griddle Five is handsome and versatile. It too can be used in an open or closed position and has both grill and griddle surfaces. Smaller than the Deluxe, it can only hold four patties at once when closed or eight when open. We found it really excelled when it came to chicken and salmon, which came out looking bronzed.
This grill has an LCD screen that shows the temperature control choices, lighted bars to show you the progress of preheating, and a timer that can count down or count up. However, the functions on the display are controlled by turning and pressing a knob with enough options to lead to some confusion. The drip pan slides into the grill but it took us a little bit of experimentation to figure out how to position it.
What holds us back from recommending this model wholeheartedly is that at higher temperatures and longer cooking times, the edges of its handle get quite hot. Although it wasn’t hot enough to burn us, it was a cause for some concern.
On the Black and Decker 3-in-1 Grill Griddle and Waffle Maker, you get cooking plates that can be reversed from a flat side to a waffle side so it really is like getting two appliances in one. It does a nice job of browning burgers and grilling cheese sandwiches, but we didn’t test it with chicken and fish because the small handle becomes too hot to touch after cooking.
With the Black and Decker, you don’t get a drip pan and have to put a small bowl underneath the drip spout at one corner to prevent a messy countertop. Dishwasher cleaning isn’t recommended. On the upside, Black and Decker hardware can be found almost everywhere, so there's a good chance that, should you prefer to shop in local stores over online outlets, you'll be able to pick one up without too much trouble.
Hi, I'm Sharon Franke, and I’ve been reviewing kitchen equipment for more than 30 years. Before that, I womaned the grill in New York City restaurants for seven years. It’s been a long time since I lived in a house with a backyard, so an electric grill is my best bet for burgers.
And as those of you who have read my other reviews know, I’m a pushover for anything crispy. If there’s one on the menu, I’ll always order a grilled cheese sandwich.
We tested nine grills including those with wide-open surfaces and others with lids that close down and cook the food from two sides at once. In each, we toasted bread to see the evenness of the grill’s heating pattern and then grilled hamburgers to see how long it took to cook if it left distinct grill marks, and how evenly it browned.
In the closed grills, which are often called contact grills or panini presses, we cooked a thick ham, cheese, and tomato sandwich on sourdough bread. At that point, we eliminated products that we thought had serious drawbacks. In the remaining five grills, we made chicken breasts and salmon filets.
Credit:
Reviewed / Sharon Franke
Testing included grilling up burgers, chicken, and salmon.
As we grilled, we considered the ease of use of each appliance. We looked at how easy it was to use the controls, determine when the surfaces were preheated, and clean the various parts as well as whether or not there were any safety concerns. Because we know space is at a premium for most of us, we noted how much room they required on the countertop and in a cabinet.
Differences Between Open and Contact Grills
An open grill definitely gives more of the illusion that you’re actually grilling. It has a fairly wide grate that sits over a drip pan and you flip food over just as you would on an outdoor grill. While they hold more food at once than a contact grill, they take about twice as long to cook. Plus, they require more countertop and storage space, and their larger grill surfaces and drip pans take up more room in the sink or the dishwasher.
In our tests, open grills didn’t give us much better results than a closed grill and they can’t be used to make a pressed sandwich. For this reason, we didn’t select any of the open grills we tested as a top pick.
Prices were accurate at the time this article was published but may change over time.
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Meet the tester
Sharon Franke
Contributor
Sharon has tested and reviewed kitchen equipment for over 30 years. Before becoming a cooking tools maven, she worked as a professional chef in New York City restaurants.
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