How we ranked these
We own no units and run no tests, so nothing below is a hands-on verdict. What this page ranks is published specification plus geometry you can check in the product photo — and for outdoor cooking those two things get you further than they do indoors, because the grill supplies the heat and the pan only has to supply a shape. Four criteria, in the order they matter.
1. Perforated or solid
This is the whole category split. A perforated plate exists so that food smaller than the gap between your grate bars can be cooked over fire at all: shrimp, sliced peppers, green beans, scallops, a fillet of fish that would otherwise weld to the bars and tear. The holes keep the smoke and the flame contact that make food taste grilled rather than fried. The cost is that a perforated plate cannot hold oil, cannot hold a marinade, cannot build a sauce, and — by Lodge’s own published instruction — cannot come indoors. A solid floor gives up the smoke contact and gains everything else. Both of the pieces at the top of this page are perforated. Three of the six are solid.
2. Loop handles, not a lever
An ordinary skillet handle is a foot-long iron lever designed to let you tilt a pan one-handed on a stovetop. On a grill it is a liability: it juts past the edge of the grate, it fights the hinge when you close the lid, and on a kettle it is the reason the lid does not seat. Loop handles solve all three. Of the picks below, four have two short loops and no lever, which is not a coincidence — Lodge makes dual-handle versions of its 12-inch pans specifically because that is what grate cooking wants. If you already own a long-handled 12-inch skillet, you can absolutely use it on a grill with the lid up; you will just be reaching across heat.
3. Published cooking area, not published size
Almost nobody in cast iron publishes the surface you can actually put food on, which is a gap this site has had to note on nearly every roundup it has written. Lodge is the exception on exactly two pieces here. Its grill topper publishes a cooking surface of 11.56 by 10.31 inches inside a 15 by 12-inch footprint, and both the basket and the ribbed pan publish a 9.5-inch flat bottom inside an 11.75-inch length. Those figures are why the topper ranks first: a rectangle of 119 square inches beats a 12-inch circle’s flat floor by a wide margin, and on a grill you are usually cooking for a crowd. For everything else on this page, the honest answer is that the usable area is unstated, and we say so on the card.
4. Weight, read the other way round
Indoors, weight in cast iron buys heat retention. On a grill you already have a firebox, so mass mostly buys you preheat time and forearm strain. That inverts the usual ranking: the topper at 6.68 lb and the dual handle pan at 6.61 lb are the two lightest full-size pieces here and the two we recommend first, while the ribbed grill pan at 8.62 lb is the heaviest and is a pick only if you specifically want ribs. If weight is the axis you care about generally, our lightweight cast iron skillet roundup ranks the whole registry on published pounds.
What this page deliberately does not rank
Enameled anything.Covered above, and worth repeating because the prettiest pots in the category are the ones people most want to carry outside. Le Creuset sells a 12-inch enameled grill basket; we have not ranked it, because Lodge’s published rule for enamel over fire applies to the material, not the brand. If you want the reasoning in full it is in enameled cast iron oven-safe temperatures.
Anything with wood or silicone on it.A grill runs hotter than a burner and the heat is not confined to a ring under the pan. A silicone handle holder is rated by its maker in the low hundreds of degrees — Lodge’s own holder publishes 500°F for hands and Lodge says explicitly not to use it over a flame or during cooking. Take it off before the pan goes out.
Legged camp dutch ovens. Three legs are designed to stand in coals, not to balance on a grate, and a camp oven on a gas grill is a pot held an inch above the heat by three points of contact. Those belong in our camp dutch oven roundup, alongside the fire-management arithmetic they need.
The Lodge Cook-It-All.This is the piece a lot of kettle-grill owners actually want: a 14-inch reversible grill/griddle plate that doubles as the lid for a 6.8-quart wok/skillet, with two detachable handles, made in the USA. It is a genuinely clever system and we would have ranked it, but on 2026-11-06 the Amazon listing read “Only 7 left in stock” — below the threshold this site uses for a buy card, because a roundup that sends you to a sold-out page is worse than one that mentions a product and tells you to look it up. If you see it in stock, it is worth the money.
Sizing a pan to your grill
The constraint outdoors is not the burner, it is the lid. Measure two things before you buy: the width of your grate at its narrowest usable point, and the clearance between the grate and the closed lid at the edges, not the middle. A kettle grill’s dome gives you plenty of height at the center and very little at the rim, which is why a 15-inch rectangle sits better on a rectangular gas grill and a 12-inch round sits better on a kettle.
For a three-burner gas grill, the 20 x 10.5-inch Pro-Grid is the piece that uses the grill properly: it spans two burners, so you can run one side hot for searing and the other at medium, which is the outdoor version of a two-zone stovetop. For a 22-inch kettle, a 12-inch round piece is the largest thing that will let the lid seat cleanly with food on it. For a portable or tailgate grill, the limiting factor is usually that the grate is small and the lid is shallow, which argues for the thinnest piece here — the 0.85-inch topper.
And give the iron the grill’s own preheat, not a longer one. Lodge’s published guidance for a gas grill is five to ten minutes at medium-high, and then to turn the heat down, because iron holds what it is given. That is the single most common outdoor mistake with cast iron: preheating a pan on a grill the way you would on a stovetop and then cooking at the same setting, which scorches seasoning and burns food that would otherwise be fine. Our preheating guide has the indoor version of the same arithmetic.
What a grill does to seasoning — and what to do about it
A grill will take a pan past the temperature a stovetop normally reaches, and seasoning is polymerized oil, not armor. Run bare iron over a hot charcoal bed for long enough and the finish will go from black to gray-brown in patches, which looks alarming and is almost always cosmetic: the iron is unharmed and the fix is to cook fatty food in it, or to re-season it once. The piece most exposed to this is whichever one sits directly over the flames with no food on it, so do not leave an empty pan on a hot grill while you go and fetch the chicken.
Then there is the part nobody enjoys. Lodge’s published care line for every piece on this page is three words — “Hand wash, dry, oil” — and a perforated plate makes all three harder, because burnt marinade collects in and around the holes. Soak nothing; cast iron and standing water are a rust appointment. Get it while it is still warm, use hot water and a stiff nylon brush, and if something has set hard, a pan scraper plus coarse salt does more than soap will. The full method is in our guide to cleaning cast iron, and the tools worth owning for it are in best cast iron accessories.
One last habit that matters more outdoors than in: dry it on heat rather than on a towel. The grill is already lit, so the easiest place to evaporate the last of the water off a just-washed pan is the grill you cooked on, for two minutes, before you shut the gas off. Then a wipe of oil, thin enough that the pan looks dry.
If you only buy one
Buy the 15 x 12-inch grill topper if your grilling problem is small food. Buy the 12-inch dual handle pan if your grilling problem is that you want to cook a whole dish outdoors — onions and peppers, a skillet of potatoes, a sear followed by a sauce — and then carry it inside. Those two cover almost everyone, they cost the same, and between them they are the clearest illustration of this page’s one rule: the hole pattern is the product.
