Le Creuset Square Grillit > Reviews (3)

I’ve had my Le Creuset Grill pan a good few years now. Initially when I ordered it, I planned on slowly buying additional Le Creuset pans until I had a set. After using it for a while however, I changed my mind on that…

This pan is a square cast iron grill pan. Le Creuset are a company renowned for quality and indeed when I received this, I could immediately see that it was well made. It comes in a range of colours; I have the orange, simply because it was the only one available at the time, but I have seen it in red, blue and cream as well.

The first thing I noticed about the pan was its weight. Of course it’s cast iron so I wasn’t expecting to lift it with my little finger, but it is very heavy and despite being a perfectly fit twenty-something year old, I do find myself struggling to lift it sometimes. It does have a lip on the outer edge of the pan which helps somewhat, as I can lift with the handle in one hand and the lip in the other.

Being a grill pan, the pan has ridges, which means that whatever you choose to cook is raised up off the surface of the pan and any fat or juices drip down into the bottom. There is a pouring lip on each side to dispense of this fat.

The pan is not non-stick, although there are methods of making pans non-stick – something about burning salt in them I believe. One of the best things about this pan, is that being cast iron, it conducts heat very well and then retains heat for some time too. I found quite quickly that the pan gets hotter than my usual stainless steel pans in a shorter time and the first time I used this, I practically welded a chicken breast to it! You also need to take into account that the handle is metal and although it has a coating on it, it still gets hot, so I often need to use an oven glove to move it.

I usually use this pan for grilling meat, as I find it is a slightly healthier alternative to frying and has come in useful since my George Foreman grill bit the dust. I find it is best used with thicker cuts of meat, such as chicken breasts, pork chops or sausages. I did try cooking bacon in this pan, however I found that it cooks so quickly that it tended to stick, so you do have to keep an eye on it almost constantly.

One problem I found with the pan, was that with my last cooker, which was electric, the heat from the ring on the hob didn’t seem to heat the whole pan. Say I had three chicken breasts cooking side by side, whichever one was in the corner would not cook properly on the edges as there was simply no heat there. For that reason I think making the pan round could be of benefit. Since moving house, I now have a gas hob and the problem doesn’t seem as bad here, providing that I use it on one of the larger rings.

Size wise the pan is quite large at 26cm x 26cm. There is more than enough room for four chicken breasts or four pork chops and you can easily make a fry up for a few people in this pan too.

When I first bought this it came with a care leaflet, which stated that the pan should be washed with a nylon scourer to prevent it being scratched or damaged.

I made a trip into town specifically to get myself some nylon scourers, but when it came to using them, I found they were useless! As the pan is predominantly used for meat, I’m sure you can imagine, it gets quite messy, especially in between the ridges. I found that a nylon scourer would barely touch it and eventually gave up and risked using a normal sponge scourer, which brought this up brilliantly first time and after three or fours years of using these, the pan is showing no signs of damage.

The Le Crueset grill pan costs £55 from Amazon, which I think is about average for most places. On the high street you can get this pan from Debenhams, John Lewis or House of Fraser. Although Le Creuset products are often on sale, I find this tends to be their stoneware rather than their pans.

The pan is also suitable for the oven up to a temperature of 190 degrees and is dishwasher safe. Like most of the Le Creuset cast iron products it has a lifetime guarantee.

On the whole this is a good pan. It gets hot quickly and retains heat well and food is always cooked well in this pan. It is also well made and durable too. As I said at the beginning of the review, using this pan has put me off buying other Le Creuset pans. The reason is, that for the price, I would like to have something which is non-stick and something that I can actually lift! This is not the fault of the pan, but it seems my apparently weak arms are not designed to be hauling cast iron pans about! I have trouble lifting my stainless steel pans when they are full of water and veg, so I don’t think I’d fare very well with a cast iron one. So whilst I won’t be purchasing more products from this range, I will be holding onto this one and would recommend it – just make sure you can lift it first!