The Best Griddle Grills

A griddle grill is a big steel pancake that happens to sit on a cart. That sounds silly until you cook on one. Eggs, bacon, hash browns, and toast all go down at once, and nothing falls through the grates. Smash burgers pick up the lacy brown crust you can't get over an open flame. Fried rice, quesadillas, cheesesteaks, and fajitas all work. If you own a grill and keep wishing you had a flat surface, this is the machine you're missing.

No griddle is low-maintenance, though. Steel plates rust if you leave them wet, so you'll oil the surface after every cook and keep a cover on it. Even four-burner models run hotter in the middle than at the edges, so you learn to park finished food near the corners. Grease has to go somewhere, and it'll find your driveway if you skip the tray. These things are also heavy. Once a 36-inch griddle lands on your patio, it mostly stays there.

So the real question is how much steel you need and how much fuss you'll tolerate. Four burners give you a searing zone and a warming zone at the same time, which matters more than raw size once you're feeding a crowd. Two burners are plenty for a family of four. Coated plates skip most of the seasoning work but won't sear quite as hard. We think that the Blackstone Original Portable Griddle with Built-in Hood is the best griddle grill for most people, and that the Pit Boss Ultimate Gas 4 Burner Griddle is the one to buy if you'd rather not season steel.

Buy a griddle if you already grill and keep hitting the limits of grates: eggs, pancakes, fried rice, chopped vegetables, cheesesteaks, anything small enough to fall through. Serious Eats points out that a flat plate reuses rendered fat and residue as it cooks, which is why big batches brown more evenly on steel than over an open flame. Griddles are also the right answer if you host breakfast, feed a youth sports team, or make smash burgers more than a few times a year. If you mostly cook two steaks and some corn, a regular grill still does that better.

This guide covers freestanding propane griddles you'd put on a patio, in a driveway, or at a campsite. It doesn't cover electric countertop griddles, pellet grills, flat-top inserts that drop into an existing grill, or the accessories that fit those machines. If your outdoor space is a small balcony where propane isn't allowed, none of these will work for you, and an indoor electric griddle is a different shopping trip.

Surface and zones: We compared listed square inches against burner count, because four valves beat a big plate with two. Plate material: Wirecutter puts cold-rolled steel roughly 30 percent faster to searing heat than coated plates, so we treated bare steel as the performance choice and ceramic as the low-maintenance one. Grease: Consumer Reports found rear troughs caught more than 90 percent of rendered fat, so front-drain designs lost points. Portability: Folding legs, lift-off plates, and shipping weight decided which griddles can actually travel. Owner feedback: We read each listing's reports for patterns around rust and sticking, and flagged the models too new to have any.

If you want a griddle that folds into a trunk: The Blackstone Adventure Ready 2-Burner 28" Outdoor Griddle ($357.20) — The Adventure Ready 28 gives up two burners and about 320 square inches next to the 36-inch model, and gets folding legs in return. Wirecutter singled out the smaller 22-inch version for how shallow it packs for trunk storage, and the 28 follows the same idea with more room to cook. Its 448 square inches still holds 44 hot dogs, which covers most tailgates and campsites. You get rear grease management, a built-in igniter, and by far the longest owner track record in this lineup. What you lose is the hood, the extra heat zones, and the side shelves.

This is what our research surfaced in the griddle category, not a map of everything sold. Griddle lineups turn over fast, and plenty of decent models from smaller brands never show up in the published testing and spec comparisons we relied on. Everything else in this lineup ended up as a pick, a close alternative, or an accessory rather than a griddle in its own right.

Bare steel needs a patina, not a coating. The Spruce Eats recommends three to four thin coats of a high-smoke-point oil before your first cook: wipe on a little, heat until it stops smoking, let it cool, repeat. After that the routine is short. Scrape the plate while it's still warm, wipe it with a paper towel, then rub a thin film of oil across the whole surface. Empty the grease tray before it overflows, because a full tray is how griddles end up staining a patio. Keep a cover on it between cooks, and dry the plate after rain. Ceramic-coated plates skip the seasoning but still want oil, a cover, and a soft scraper.

For this guide:

• We read published griddle testing and comparisons from Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, Good Housekeeping, and Serious Eats on plate materials, grease routing, and how flat tops brown food.
• We pulled cooking area, burner counts, and BTU figures from each manufacturer's own listing and spec sheet rather than from secondhand summaries.
• We read owner feedback across these listings for recurring themes, and treated models with only a handful of reports behind them as less proven.
• We read owner reviews on every listing, weighted toward the critical ones, because that is where the recurring failures show up.
• We have a systematic way of automatically fetching the latest prices, so the numbers on this page stay current.
• This is a research-focused guide, so the team may not own every product listed — though we often do own the top winners, which gives us extra context for the recommendations.
• We don't accept free products, and the retailer commission never changes which product we recommend.