Best grill: top-rated health grills for tasty meals

Owning the best grill is your gateway to quick, tasty meals and healthier snacks. Also dubbed a health grill, these devices are a smaller-sized, portable version of a traditional oven grill and a dream at eliminating excess oil from your diet. At the same time, they speed up your cooking times, making healthy meal prep far more straightforward. 

What’s on the table? With the best health grill, it’s easy to rustle up grilled fish or meat, sandwiches and wraps, and a whole assortment of other staple foods such as burgers, omelets, eggs, and paninis using different cooking modes. By sandwiching your food between an upper and lower cooking plate, the health grill cooks your food thoroughly and at a far quicker rate than a traditional grill, meaning that you’re less likely to resort to fast-food options and instant snacks. 

Cleaning up after cooking isn’t overly complicated either. Most grills can be wiped down with a cloth before they’re ready to go again. Any oil from the food runs down the channels in the grill and is scooped up by a dish at the front, which can be swiftly emptied or popped into the dishwasher. That means less grease and saturated fat in your meal.

Bonus points if you’re looking for the best grill that can recreate the beautiful lines a traditional grill leaves on your prime cuts; just look for a model with ridged plates. The larger the size and the more separate compartments, the easier it is to rustle up larger and more elaborate recipes such as those in the best vegan cookbooks. 

The best grills you can buy right now

The OptiGrill+ is a great all-round option for most people. For starters, the build is top quality – die-cast aluminum grill plates are much more wear-resistant compared to cheaper alternatives, and all the cooking surfaces are detachable and dishwasher-safe for easy cleaning. 

Under the hood, the OptiGrill+ is packed with features too, including automatic programs for burgers, poultry, bacon, sausage, red meat, and fish and built-in thickness detection so it will alert you when your meat goes from rare to medium to well done. 

If you don’t need the bells and whistles, that’s fine – just stick it into manual mode and grill away to your heart’s content. 

Heston’s Sage range boasts impressive feature sets at high prices and the Smart Grill Pro is no different. At nearly 10kg, this grilling behemoth isn’t the sort of thing you can stash in a drawer when you’re not using it, but for the money and the size you get a phenomenally professional bit of equipment. 

The Smart Grill Pro has a variable height setting on the upper plate so you can use it as a press, but it’ll also open flat, making it into a huge electric barbecue. It’ll deal happily with anything you throw on it, but meat cookery is where Heston’s grill comes into its own – the Smart Grill Pro has dedicated settings for pork, beef, poultry, lamb and fish, and a built-in temperature probe monitors the internal temperature of the meat, letting you cook to your desired doneness! 

George Foreman grills might not be the most advanced out there, but big George is still the guy to go to if you’re looking for a quality budget grill that does the simple things right. 

The new streamlined design means, unlike the OptiGrill+ and the Smart Grill Pro, the George Foreman 5-Portion will easily slide into a drawer or a cupboard when you’re not using it. 

When it’s time to grill, it ticks all the boxes – it heats up fast, there’s enough space to cook multiple portions at once, the drip tray is nice and wide and all the important parts are detachable so you can wipe them down in a jiffy. 

The design is a little on the clunky side, but under the surface this Cuisinart grill has some neat little features. The clever floating hinge mechanism makes it very versatile – you can open it out into a flat tabletop grill, but it also works as a very serviceable sandwich press. 

The plates inside are detachable for easy cleaning and also reversible, so you can switch between ridged or flat plates depending on what you’re cooking. The wattage is a little lower than some of the other options, so the Cuisinart doesn’t have the same blazing power as the Sage or Tefal options on this list, but it’s still a very capable and versatile option. 

This griddle and hot plate combo grill is a two-in-one marvel, packing two separate cooking zones into one machine each. Both the griddle and the grill are a decent size – four-portion and six-portion respectively – and they have independent variable temperature dials so you can be keeping something warm on the hotplate whilst you’re searing meat and vegetables on the griddle. 

The construction is solid, but the grill plates aren’t detachable – this means they heat up very quickly, but cleaning them afterward is a bit of a pain. But if you’re looking for something with a bit more versatility than the classic grill and enough space to feed a hungry family, the Griddle & Grill might just be the one for you.

How to choose the best grill for you 

There are a number of factors to consider when deciding on the best grill for you. 

Price

You can nab yourself a good grill for anywhere between $25/£20 and upwards of $400/£300, but there are a lot of factors in between to consider. At the bottom end of the scale, you’re generally looking at smaller, less powerful options with nothing in the way of extra functions or features. 

Size and power

These smaller grills are still perfectly serviceable for single portions and vegetarian cooking, but if you’re cooking meat and fish for a number of people, you’ll need to upgrade to something bigger and more powerful. More power means more heat, which means a better sear and more flavor on your meat.

Cleaning

Cleaning is another important factor worth considering. If you’ve used a regular grill with any regularity, you’ll know that it gets dirty pretty quickly. Electric grills are no exception – many of them come with detachable grill plates that are dishwasher-safe for easy cleaning, but this isn’t guaranteed, especially with cheaper models. Ultimately, the grill is only as good as its plates, so it’s worth investing in good quality non-stick griddles.

Is grilling healthy? 

Many people turn to electric food grills when trying to eat healthy as cooking fats in meat or fish are drained out. We know that eating less saturated fat is good for our health, so if you like to eat food like steaks or oily fish, this can be a great way to cook them without adding fat to your meal. 

However, bear in mind that simply cooking food on a grill won’t make it healthy. A high fat meat will still be high in fat, for example, it just means that when it’s cooking, it isn’t sat in its own cooking fat. 

The good news is that the best health grills avoid your intake of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heterocyclic amines (HCAs), substances that are created when fat drips onto coals on a traditional grill or BBQ.