Do you use grill mats?

[Jenise]

A friend is all crazy about grill mats and just alerted me to them being for sale at Costco this season. I have not eaten food Vic has cooked this way. Another friend that we camp with from time to time seems to be equally smitten and uses one on his small, folding Weber. I have eaten several things cooked on it.

And I don't get it.

Best I can tell, the non-porous mat turns a barbecue grill into a skillet surface. Anything containing moisture steams. I asked Vic and he said "well, shrimp and veggies don't fall through." If that's the concern get a grilling basket: problem solved. For the camping friend, with fewer options and a need to cook almost everything outside, it at least makes some sense because maybe you don't want everything to taste grilled. But for Vic, with a high-tech kitchen, why? If you don't want grilled taste and you don't want things falling through, cook them on your fancy stove! Stir fry them on your 25,000 BTU wok burner! But buying mats so your barbecue can do what it was never meant to in the first place? I don't understand.

If you use grilling mats, let me hear from you.

The first question that pops into my head is, "What's that?" So you know my answer.

What John said.

If you are talking about the non-stick sheets (the ones I’m thinking of are brown and around 30 x 40 cm) I use them on the flat-top section say for eggs, pancakes etc. otherwise they are great as re*usable liners in the kitchen, I cut them to fit cake tins, roasting dishes, biscuit trays instead of forever cutting and discarding baking parchment, just wash and dry. Martha would be proud of npme

[Robin Garr]

We use Cookina sheets in the kitchen, very much in the way Barb describes: To turn things that are not nonstick, like roasting pans, into nonstick. But I can't see why anyone would use one on the grill.

I do have a couple of the roll up grill mats. Don't use them often, usually when doing a big summer party. Last time I used for marinated shrimp and scallops. I basically run the grill for several hours. I really don't want to shut down grill from meats and veggies to run inside and start stove. It really does make it more a griddle than a grill , but works well (and the non-stick surface is a lot more easier to flip/move things around than my basket is). I could also see using grill mats if you just didn't want to heat up house on a really hot day.
I don't think there's anything that I've done that was better on grill mat than in a wok, saute pan, or a griddle, but sometimes I want to cook outdoors and it is workable for that.

Again, in another "no better than stove but if you want to do on grill" I've also cooked thick slab bacon that someone brought to a party on grill mat, keeps fat from flaring if you want to cook at temps above indirect.
But I agree there is no food that I've run across that grill mat is superior way of cooking, just more convenient if using grill

[Jenise]

Dale, you captured it well when you said more of a griddle than a grill. That's why I didn't quite understand Vic's fandom, especially since I know his kitchen. He is, btw, a highly scientific person--taught science overseas for decades as part of the armed forces schools. His scientific background sometimes leads to weird, long workarounds that make sense only to him. For instance, he was recruited to cook hot dogs for some giant yard sale--he took along his Thermapen and stuck it up the butt of every one of those dogs before he would declare them 'done'. And years ago my wine club had a Burger night in which he and another scientist type volunteered to cook. Our clubhouse has two giant outdoor grills. But they decided those couldn't be deemed clean enough, so they put half sheets on the grills and essentially griddled the burgers which pretty much defeated the whole outdoor burger thing. That's just Vic--a sweetie, but anal.

I'd not heard of these until quite recently, when ads for a grill mat impregnated with copper (because that makes it better!!) showed up alongside the bladder control product ads on the channel that carries TJ Hooker. Just from the ads, it appears that their mat does indeed turn the grill into a griddle. I can see how this might be useful in some situations (as Dale says). We don't do enough grilling to make one worthwhile for us, though.