If you’ve seen chef Harold Villarosa’s tantalizing videos of steak okonomiyaki and adobo grilled cheese over on the Bon Appétit YouTube channel, you might have noticed that one of his go-to pieces of equipment is a Presto electric nonstick pancake griddle. Villarosa’s twin griddles allow him to cook with comfort just about anywhere. Though we’ve all made a stack of ’jacks on the handy, portable appliance, in these videos Villarosa completely reimagines their use, employing one more traditionally as a flattop for direct cooking and the other in place of a burner for pots and pans.
Villarosa’s griddle love runs deep. “Five years ago I started working with students in New York City to teach them how to cook. The Department of Education wouldn’t let us use the cafeteria kitchens, so I had to create mobile kitchens in school libraries and auditoriums,” he explains. So he gathered equipment for his teaching kitchens: a cutting board, an immersion blender, and two electric pancake griddles that could stand in for the flattop grills that are an essential part of professional kitchens.
“These griddles sear perfectly,” he says. “If you cook salmon skin on it, it becomes super crispy. I’ve done a lot on this thing—charred onions and steak, a whole fish.” Anything you’d cook on a flattop, Baking Steel, or cast-iron griddle you can cook on Harold’s Presto. Smash burgers, breakfast fare, grilled cheese—all fair game.
But there’s more to the griddle than searing and crisping. Villarosa uses them as he would a stovetop, in place of a portable gas or induction burner. “If you have a pancake griddle and turn the heat up to the highest setting, you can put pots on that hot flattop.” In his steak okonomiyaki video, the chef uses the griddle as a heating surface for his nonstick frying pan, in which he cooks the okonomiyaki pancake. In the grilled cheese video, he braises his chicken adobo in a heavy-bottomed saucepan set atop the Presto. He has even put it to work making an entire pasta dinner with the students. Together they boiled handmade agnolotti stuffed with butternut squash in one pot and finished them with a sage and brown butter sauce in another, all on the griddle.
Villarosa recommends electric griddles to anyone who might be cooking in a nontraditional kitchen but still has access to a power source—students who don’t want to fight for space in the communal dorm kitchen, homeowners waiting out a kitchen renovation, or even apartment dwellers waiting for their gas to be turned on. He also thinks griddle cooking could benefit anyone who does have access to a traditional kitchen but finds it lacking. “Some apartments without gas have electric stove tops that take forever to heat up and usually don’t distribute the heat evenly.” A quality plug-in griddle is a step up.
If you do decide to get to know your griddle better as a multitasking machine, Villarosa suggests getting familiar with how it heats, especially if you’re used to setting a precise temperature for your oven but not your range. “You can really play around with the dials and figure out which heat settings work best for you. It’s like DJ’ing, almost.”