Not everyone has a decent stove top, and many of us want to cook a steak, a piece of fish, or something else that can be grilled with ease. Enter Breville’s Thermal Pro Grill, an electric option that shouldn’t cost you more than a hundred bucks.
Features
Designed to make grilling easy, Breville’s Thermal Pro Grill is essentially a non-stick pan that sits on top of a 2400 watt heating element.
A grand total of 15 settings are available for you to use, and the entire appliance consists of two parts: a frypan with built-in element beneath it, and the electric probe that connects to the heating element.
Breville’s element has been designed to emulate gas style cooking, too, meaning the heat will be felt in the walls of the pan, effectively encompassing any food you throw into the pan.
The unit features non slip feet, while the pan has a pouring spout, making it possible to pour contents out of the pan easily.
Performance
One of the GadgetGuy staffers was recently telling us that he needed to find an electric griller, as the kitchen in his studio just wasn’t up to scratch.
It’s not an uncommon complaint, this one, and while many of us live without a decent oven with grilling facilities, some of us don’t even have a stove top with which to really go out and fry, grill, or cook using a pan. Students living in dorms, you probably know what I’m talking about.
Breville has a solution in the form of the $100 Thermal Pro Grill, a pan with shark-tooth raised indents that allows you to sear meat, fish, and veggies with ease.
The appliance is pretty easy to work out, and once you take it out of its box, you’ll see that this is a non-stick frypan sitting atop a heating element that takes an electric control probe.
Breville’s electric grill is merely these two parts, and they’re pretty easy to use, with the electric probe having one part plugged into the wall socket, while the other part goes into the available probe port of the Thermal Pro Grill.
Once they’re connected, simply switch the fry pan to the desired setting, watch the light go on, and wait for it to switch off when the temperature has been reached.
The speed seems to be pretty decent with this one, as the Thermal Pro Grill reaches the right temperature within two minutes with no problems. This was even on the second highest setting as we were about to cook some fish, and that’s something even our electric stove can’t manage.
Not too shabby if you ask us, and if you’re struggling to work out what setting to use, the manual has a decent listing of what to use and for what food type to use these with.
In our testing, the temperature seemed consistent across the entire pan, which means you won’t have to worry about moving the food around to the hottest parts, an issue some of us with mediocre stove tops have to come to grips with.
Washing and cleaning the pan is easy too, and once you’re done cooking, just make sure to turn it off, wait for the pan to cool, and then remove the probe from the pan by pushing the release clip and detaching it.
While the frypan can be completely submerged in water, it’s not rocket science to work out that you shouldn’t be submerging the part sending through the electricity. Detach it and wash the pan separately, making sure to dry out the thermal prove cavity section before you plug the probe back in for use later on.
Overall, it’s hard not to like the Thermal Pro Grill, and if you’re living in a place without a decent kitchen, this model is an easy recommendation, but we’re a little confused why the unit doesn’t disconnect from its base station and heating element.
Maybe it’s just us, but there’s no reason why Breville couldn’t have made the actual element able to be detached from the pan, thereby making it possible to support different types of pans, instead of needing to buy multiple units for multiple types of cooking.
Breville classes this as an “electric fry pan,” which it technically is, but since it also has other products with similar bottom heat elements supporting 2400 watts, we’re confused why you need to buy the entire thing and can’t just buy separate frypans to connect with the main station.
The main reason seems to stem from the pans being completely connected with the heating element, and we’re not sure it needs to be.
Conclusion
We have a suggestion to make this better, but even without our suggestion, it’s a great unit to get some grilling done.
The teeth in the pan are good for making a nice grilling pattern that looks lovely on steaks, and the heating is consistent, too, making it an easy choice if you’re on the lookout for an electric frypan.
