Fall Kitchen Upgrades #3: The Griddle We’d Leave On The Stove

There are pans you own because you need them.

And then there are pans that quietly change what you feel like cooking.

This is the second kind.

For Fall Kitchen Upgrades #3, we’re making room for the Misen 13-Inch Carbon Nonstick Griddle — one big, gloriously open cooking surface that makes you want to start smashing, searing, flipping, and crisping things immediately.

And at $149, it feels like a surprising amount of kitchen real estate for the money.

The magic is the space.

Without tall skillet walls getting involved, you can actually get a spatula underneath things. You can spread ingredients out instead of piling them on top of each other. Steam has somewhere to escape. Browning gets better. Flipping gets easier.

Suddenly, breakfast looks like pancakes sizzling on one side while bacon gets crisp on the other.

Lunch becomes a grilled cheese with the kind of edge-to-edge crust you normally only get at a diner.

Dinner?

Press two balls of beef directly onto the hot surface, smash them thin, let the edges go deeply brown and lacy, then scrape them up with a metal spatula.

That alone may justify owning a griddle.

This might be our favorite argument for it.

Think sliced zucchini, mushrooms, peppers, asparagus, scallions, onions — all spread across the surface with enough room to actually sauté instead of steam.

A little olive oil. Salt. High heat. Let everything stay put long enough to develop some color.

Pile it onto a platter, finish with lemon and herbs, and suddenly the vegetable side dish is the thing everyone keeps picking at before dinner reaches the table.

The same logic works for fajitas, crispy potatoes, salmon, quesadillas, fried eggs, French toast, sausages, or whatever else benefits from maximum contact with a hot surface.

Misen builds this one from nitrided carbon steel around an aluminum core, which means you get the browning potential of carbon steel with faster, more even heat response.

There’s no traditional nonstick coating to baby, either. The surface is naturally nonstick, gets better seasoned as you cook on it, and you can use a metal spatula without treating the pan like a museum piece.

The low walls are another small-but-important detail. They give you room to work from practically any angle — particularly useful when a smash burger has reached the crucial get-this-crust-off-the-pan-now stage.

It works on gas, electric, and induction, and it can also go into the oven or onto the grill.

In other words: very little preciousness. Lots of cooking.

We love an upgrade that earns its cabinet space by making you want to cook more things, not just one specialized thing.

This does.

Saturday morning pancakes. Sunday smash burgers. A whole mess of mushrooms and onions on Tuesday night. Crispy salmon. Bacon and eggs. Cheesesteaks. Grilled sandwiches. Vegetables with actual color on them.

One surface. A ridiculous number of possibilities.

And for $149, this might be one of the easiest kitchen upgrades we’ve seen this fall.

The move: Leave it on the stove. You’re probably going to use it again tomorrow.