How we ranked these
Four criteria, in order. They are deliberately not the criteria on our steak-skillet ranking, where stored heat comes first and the pan’s walls are a feature because a steak throws fat. A smash burger inverts that: the patty is thin, it cooks in a couple of minutes a side, and every square inch of metal that is not flat and in contact with beef is doing nothing for you.
1. Flat and unridged, which is the whole ballgame
Lodge defines a griddle in its own primer as “a flat cooking surface with slightly raised edges to keep oil, batter, and other ingredients mostly contained,” and says the main difference between a skillet and a griddle is the height of the sides. For a smash burger that low wall is not a compromise, it is the point: you need to get a stiff spatula flat under the patty and scrape the crust off the metal without a sidewall in the way. Lodge makes the same argument about maneuvering utensils when it explains that the shallow edges make it easy to work spatulas across the surface.
The corollary is the piece most people reach for and shouldn’t. A ridged grill pan touches the patty along a handful of narrow lines and leaves the rest suspended over air. That is excellent for grill marks on a thick steak and actively wrong for a burger whose entire selling point is an edge-to-edge brown crust. Lodge’s own page for the 10.5-inch square grill pan describes it as “featuring raised grill ridges” and publishes 7.33 lb for it — more weight than the flat 11-inch griddle, for less usable contact. We lay out where that pan earns its place in grill pan vs griddle, and it is not here.
2. Usable flat area, measured against how many patties you cook
Four smash patties need roughly twice the room three do, because they have to stay separated long enough to form a crust — patties that touch steam each other at the join. The published numbers make the ladder clear. Lodge’s own page gives the square griddle as 17.25 by 11.0 inches overall, almost all of which is flat cooking surface because a square loses nothing to corners the way a round pan does. The 10.5-inch round griddle is drawn at 15.87 inches including the handle by 10.62 inches wide, with a cooking depth of just 0.68 inch. The reversible plate is 16.75 by 9.5 inches across two burners, and the bigger Pro-Grid version is 20 by 10.5 inches with what Lodge calls a convenient grease channel — useful here, because smash burgers render a surprising amount of fat onto a flat plate with nowhere for it to pool.
Two burners is where this gets genuinely better and also where it gets fussy. A two-burner plate only works if your cooktop can heat both zones evenly, and on a glass-top range the maker’s overhang rules matter — we go through what the cooktop manufacturers actually publish in best cast iron for a glass top stove. On gas, a long plate will always run hotter over the flames than at the ends, which is a feature once you learn it: smash on the hot zone, park finished burgers on the cool end.
3. Thermal mass you can still handle
Iron works here because it banks energy and gives it back when cold beef lands on it. More mass means less temperature drop per patty, and the published weights spread wide: 4.51 lb for the 10.5-inch round griddle, 5.9 lb on the listing for the 11-inch square griddle (Lodge’s own page says 5.58 lb for the same piece), 7.89 lb for the classic 12-inch skillet, 9.38 lb for the 16.75-inch reversible plate and 13.5 lb for the 20-inch Pro-Grid.
Heavier is better for the first thirty seconds of contact and worse for everything else: a 13.5 lb plate takes real time to preheat, needs two hands and a clear counter, and does not fit a normal drawer. We rank the whole registry on that axis in the lightweight skillet roundup. For most home cooks the 5 to 6 lb band is the sweet spot, which is why the square griddle rather than the biggest plate is the top pick.
4. A press, because the smash is a technique and not a wish
This is the cheapest meaningful upgrade on the page. Lodge publishes 2.64 lb and 6.75 by 4.5 by 3.5 inches for its LGP3 grill press, made in the USA, seasoned with 100% natural vegetable oil and covered by the same lifetime warranty as its pans — and the Amazon listing for it publishes no weight at all, which is exactly the sort of gap we would rather point out than paper over. Two and a half pounds of flat iron, pushed down for ten seconds, flattens a loose ball of beef into even contact in a way a spatula held at an angle never quite does.
A press is not magic. It cannot fix a surface that is not hot enough, it needs its own seasoning upkeep like any bare iron, and it is one more thing to store. It also wants a square of parchment between it and the patty if you would rather not scrape beef off the press every time. The rest of the toolkit — the stiff spatula that actually matters more than the press, the chainmail for cleanup — is in our cast iron accessories roundup.
The temperature question, answered as honestly as we can
Every smash-burger video on the internet gives you a surface temperature. We are not going to, because we cannot measure your burner and neither can a spec sheet. What we can tell you is what the people who make the iron and the people who regulate the beef publish.
Lodge’s own heat-source guidance is to preheat cast iron for 3 to 5 minutes on medium-low, then cook most food on medium-high; its griddle primer says to gradually preheat the griddle to medium heat. A smash burger sits at the top of that range rather than the middle, and the practical test is the one every cook ends up using: a drop of water should skitter and evaporate fast, and the fat you add should shimmer immediately without filling the kitchen with smoke.
Which brings up the fat. The University of Illinois Extension defines smoke point as the temperature at which a fat begins to smoke and notes that most cooking oils smoke somewhere between about 350°F and 450°F, with high-heat work wanting oils rated 400°F or above. For burgers at smash temperature that rules out most of the flavorful low-smoke-point oils, and it is the reason a lot of people cook these on a bare, barely-oiled surface and let the beef’s own fat do the work. Our oil guide for cast iron goes through the same numbers for seasoning, where the logic is different.
And the part nobody selling you a griddle mentions: on very hot iron a thin patty goes brown fast, and brown is not a doneness signal. The USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service is blunt about it — cook all raw ground beef to an internal temperature of 160°F measured with a food thermometer, because color and texture are not reliable indicators. FSIS cites research in which more than 25 percent of fresh ground beef patties browned prematurely, before reaching 160°F, and notes the mirror image too: some lean ground beef stays pink well above it. At 160°F a safely cooked patty, in FSIS’s own words, “may look brown, pink or some variation of brown or pink.” A smash patty is thin enough that it usually clears the mark about as soon as it has a crust — but “usually” is not a measurement, and a fast-read thermometer costs less than the alternative.
Smoke, extraction and the reason people cook these outside
This technique produces more smoke than anything else you will do on a home cooktop. Hot iron, rendering beef fat, maximum surface contact: that is the recipe for a kitchen that sets off its own alarm. Worth knowing before you buy a 20-inch plate for an apartment with a recirculating hood.
The honest workarounds are all about where you cook rather than what you cook on. Lodge clears its bare-iron griddles for any stovetop, the oven, a grill or a campfire, which means the same flat plate can go out onto a gas grill’s grates and do the job with the smoke outside. That is also the one place a two-burner plate stops being awkward. What must not go out there is enameled cast iron — Lodge states in as many words that its enamel pieces are not made for use on a grill or over a fire, and we keep a list of which pieces are cleared for which heat source in best cast iron skillets for camping.
What we would not buy for smash burgers
- A ridged grill pan or the ridged face of a reversible plate. Grill marks are the opposite of what this technique wants. Lodge publishes 7.33 lb for the 10.5-inch square grill pan on its own page (the listing says 6.5 lb) — heavier than the flat griddle, with a fraction of the contact. Buy it for the jobs it is actually good at.
- An enameled cast iron skillet. Enamel is glass fused to iron. It never builds a seasoning layer, it is the surface protein sticks to hardest, and the makers cap it: Lodge rates its enamel to 500°F and bans the grill and open fire, and Le Creuset publishes knob limits as low as 390°F on older pots. The mechanism is in why food sticks to enameled cast iron. Enamel is for braising, not for this.
- A ceramic-coated nonstick pan. The coating makers themselves tell you to stick to medium or low heat and never use metal utensils — two instructions a smash burger breaks immediately, since the whole move is a stiff metal spatula scraping crust off a very hot surface. We compare the materials properly in cast iron vs ceramic cookware.
- A deep skillet or chicken fryer. The extra inch of wall that makes those pans good at frying is the wall your spatula has to clear. Lodge publishes a 7.5-inch flat floor inside the 10.25-inch deep skillet — less flat area than a 10.5-inch round griddle, in a heavier piece. The deep skillet roundup explains what that pan is genuinely for.
- A dedicated “burger press” that forms patties. A smash burger is not a formed patty — it is a loose ball flattened on the heat, and pre-pressing it compacts the beef and costs you the ragged edges that carry the crust. The press you want is a flat weight you use on the griddle, which is the one above.
What this should cost
This is one of the cheapest upgrades in cooking. Every flat piece ranked here sits in the budget bracket, the press is cheaper still, and the full setup — a flat griddle, a press and a stiff spatula — costs a fraction of a single premium skillet. If you already own a 12-inch Lodge, the honest advice is to buy the press first, cook two batches, and only then decide whether the flat plate is worth the cupboard space.
Live prices for every pick sit in the table at the top of this page and refresh daily. We never write a price into prose, because a number in a sentence is wrong the week after it is written. If you are not in a hurry, our Black Friday cast iron hub records what has actually happened to Lodge pricing in November, and the whole flat-cookware category is covered in our cast iron griddle roundup.
One last note on upkeep, because this technique is hard on seasoning. The layer doing the releasing is polymerized oil bonded to the metal, and scraping hot crust with a metal spatula is exactly the kind of abrasion that thins it. That is normal and fixable: dry the piece, wipe it with a little oil, and re-season when it starts to look gray and patchy. Our seasoning guide has Lodge’s own 450–500°F method, and why is my cast iron sticky covers the one thing people get wrong when they try it.
