The GFG

Can we just take a moment of silence for the George Foreman Grill?

Can we just appreciate that the GFG (as I refer to it on a regular basis) revolutionized our view on cooking (I’m speaking to my fellow Generation Yers), only to be abandoned by us ten years later? By “revolutionized” I mean that for about three years in the first decade of the new millennium I actually thought I could cook because I owned not one, but two GFG!

How many of us received this gem on our way to college? Red, blue, white, black- George Foreman said no to grill-color boundaries. We can make them pink! Pink, I say!

I remember fondly Monday hamburgers with my neighbors in college where everyone brought over their GFG to create a very smoky kitchen and fatless hamburger every week.  Which brings me to my next very crucial point, which is that the GFG could really only make three things: grilled chicken, hamburgers, and grilled cheese sandwiches. You know what else can do this? A skillet.

But that didn’t stop us. Somehow the GFG was better. I mean, why we needed fatless grilled chicken is beyond me. I don’t know that grilled chicken needs to lose any fat. Hamburgers: a no-brainer, but I maintain to this day that the actual preparation of a hamburger takes place long before it touches heat, and the only seasonings that could be found in my house was salt and pepper… and some very questionable cumin which probably came with my apartment. My hamburgers were always lacking in the taste department, since they had no fat AND no seasoning. No one ever wanted any of the hamburgers made on my GFG.

The grilled cheese had me fooled for about 18 months until I finally saw someone make it in a skillet. That was the end of my love affair with George.  

The breaking point probably wasn’t the grilled-cheese revelation. The cleanup was also rather cumbersome. Here is an appliance with an electric cord that by all logic should stay away from water. However, cleaning this contraption became laughable. You could try to clean it on the counter with a sponge, but you had to wait for it to cool completely (some of us bent this rule) and you could not reuse this sponge (some of us broke this rule). So, you would get this thing soapy and brown (brown and soapy), and then, because of the SUPER!, AMAZING!, UNPARALLELED FAT DRAINER! (also known as gravity), your brown and soapy concoction would begin to sliiiiiidde down. So, you had to have cat-like reflexes to then lift this Grill to the sink where it would flap and spit back hot grease while you tried to wash it under the sink, keeping the cord free from water.

*I want to be clear: the GFG was not the contraption that made the turnovers/grilled cheese sandwiches/ waffles. That was some other contraption… although I did enjoy debating this with friends at brunch this weekend.*

George Foreman, who has five or six children all named George. George Foreman, who was given the chance to endorse the grill after Hulk Hogan turned it down (information provided to me this past Sunday over many Bloody Marys by my friend Sarah) and became a billionaire (with a B). So, kudos, George Foreman. You convinced both my parents and I that I would eat well in college (which I did) and become a decent cook with the help of your alleged “versatile” contraption (which I did not), and I feel confident that I am not alone in this boat.

Every time I pass by a garage sale and see a GFG being sold, it makes me a bit sad. The Grill did not get it’s proper place in history for all it accomplished, and that is tragic. I think George Foreman was famous for something else before the GFG, but there is no debating that my generation will always remember him as the man who toughened our chicken and gave the skillet a run for its money for about a decade. Bravo, George.