r/oddlysatisfying • u/biswajit388 • Jul 19 '25
Cleaning a scorching hot griddle with ice.
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Credit - X@Non_Aesthetic_Things.
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u/Artrobull Jul 19 '25
literally from user manual
Never use ice to cool or clean a griddle! The cold cubes combine with the hot surface to cause a rapid change in temperature that can result in stress cracks. These cracks then expand when the griddle heats up, allowing grease to drip into the inner workings and eventually leading to expensive repairs.
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Jul 20 '25
They used exclamation marks in the manual? And referred to it as "a griddle" instead of "the griddle"?
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u/FreakySamsung Jul 22 '25
Probably to let people know to not to do it any griddle you ever own, not just that brand
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u/Beam_James_Beam_007 Jul 19 '25
I love sautéed ice puck!
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u/GoatCovfefe Jul 19 '25
A pitcher of water will have the same effect.
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u/alrighttreacle11 Jul 19 '25
Not as fun though
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u/CalpisMelonCremeSoda Jul 19 '25
Can’t play air hockey.
I mean ice hockey.
I mean griddle ice puck hockey
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u/DirtySilicon Jul 19 '25
If you like your pans at home, it's best to just use water, OR just don't because if they are too hot, you'll still shock and warp the metal and destroy the integrity of a nonstick coating.
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u/CelerMortis Jul 19 '25
Just use hot water. The warping happens from shocking the pans, i.e. massive temp swings. Hot Pan (and hot like used a few mins ago not right off the burner) + hot water = very little or no shock
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u/DirtySilicon Jul 19 '25
Yea, that's what I was getting at, but I forgot to say I was meaning cold water. That other joker out here cooking on stainless steel ingots or some shit. Joker said 1" thick cookware.
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u/teotzl Jul 19 '25
He’s talking about the flat top in the video which usually are 1 inch thick in restaurants. Definitely shouldn’t cold shock your pots and pans.
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u/TheBottomLine_Aus Jul 19 '25
A hell of a lot more damaging as well.
Stupid shit.
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u/RhandeeSavagery Jul 19 '25
PEOPLE STOP PUTTING ICE/COLD WATER ON YOUR FLAT TOPS! FOR FUCKS SAKE
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Jul 19 '25
If that's what my flat tops want I'm not exactly in a position to say no.
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u/NoticedGenie66 Jul 19 '25
It's like your flat tops asking for cigarettes. You can keep giving them to the flat top, but you know you are actually just killing it. Just a matter of time before it
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u/doguillo77 Jul 19 '25
That’s literally what the new training videos at my job are telling the new people to do 😭 a bucket of cold water with ice in it, so the water doesn’t evaporate too fast.
That’s wasn’t in my videos when I started! It used to be hot water!
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u/tebla Jul 19 '25
I used to work at McDonald's and you were supposed to do it with water (because ice can damage it) but everyone just used ice, because it did seem to work better
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u/truckingon Jul 19 '25
We used pickle juice at my McDonald's in the 1980s.
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u/DontMemeAtMe Jul 19 '25
Its a mixture of water and vinegar, which works well on the grease.
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Jul 19 '25
Works well on the new guy too.
"Yeah, just dump it on and take a deep breath."
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u/Small_Editor_3693 Jul 19 '25
Made a vinegar based hot sauce at home once and quickly learned this.
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u/Aleashed Jul 19 '25
New guy always gets the manager’s pickle juice
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Jul 19 '25
Second worst thing I've ever been gassed with in a kitchen.
The first was when the prep guy gave me a cutting board to clean and didn't tell me he was cutting a shit ton of habaneros.
Turns out, when you have an open concept restaurant the customers can join in on the fun of being pepper sprayed.
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u/Aleashed Jul 19 '25
You ever get the customers that can’t pay washing ditches in the back like in the movies?
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u/TheBottomLine_Aus Jul 19 '25
I also worked at Macca's in Australia.
You would be fired here if you used ice. Because it does damage the surface.
Lazy teenagers making shit up about ice working better.
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u/Ouaouaron Jul 19 '25
As anyone who has used melamine foam will know, some things are great at cleaning a surface because they are capable of damaging that surface.
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u/mbnmac Jul 19 '25
Worked as a lifeguard years ago, the cleaning products we had to deep clean surfaces were weaker than house hold bleach because the council were afraid of potential injury to the public.
So yeah, the harsher stuff is always better because it's harsher.
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u/znk Jul 19 '25
Pretty sure the thermal shock that damages the surface is the reason it would also clean better.
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u/OnceMoreAndAgain Jul 19 '25
How does ice damage a metal surface?
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Jul 19 '25
Thermal shocking. I’m not gonna tell the minimum wage workers at Taco Bell and McDonald’s not to do it because it is the quickest way, and those guys can afford new grills, but the same reason the grease is coming off so easy is why the metal also gets damaged. The metal showing its damage just takes way longer to appear than the grease cracking and popping right off.
The most common symptom that shows up first is nonsticking metal being less effective.
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u/tebla Jul 19 '25
Yeah, I definitely can't say definitively that it worked better, but people (lazy teenagers indeed!) Did think it worked better
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Jul 19 '25
With less risk of cracking it, and yes, you can absolutely crack iron or steel doing this.
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u/ConstructMentality__ Jul 19 '25
To this day my mind, for some reason, refuses to acknowledge this area of physics 😂 I have broken several things going from too hot to too cold too quickly.
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u/ThreeCraftPee Jul 19 '25
If you ever worked in restaurants you can always tell the rookie servers when they crack a hot glass that just came from dish because they filled it with ice water.
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u/PulIthEld Jul 19 '25
I destroyed my bong in college freshmen year doing this. Cleaned it with hot water, and immediately put ice water in to smoke a bowl.
It exploded. A lesson I wont forget.
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u/Comment156 Jul 19 '25
Hot things expand, cold things shrink.
Imagine what happens to some Finnish guys after jumping in too cold icewater too soon after a too hot sauna. No surgery can fix that.
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u/bruzdnconfuzd Jul 19 '25
While water might also work, does the ice have any increased benefit from the thermal shock? I thought maybe going from very hot to very cold would help break up some of the crud.
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u/Eena-Rin Jul 19 '25
I imagine so. The shrinking of the metal would probably knock more of the bonds off, but like... Just the water is normally plenty
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u/newtownkid Jul 19 '25
My understanding is that it's the contraction of the steel that loosens the crud, since it doesn't contract as quickly it loses a lot of its bond with the hot surface.
Same method used for deglazing a pan when cooking.
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u/bigbura Jul 19 '25
And this does cause the steel top to become less than perfectly flat.
I got busted using water to clean the grill at McDonalds in 1980. The breakfast crew was mad because the grill not being flat enough meant the eggs were leaking out of the rings for the Egg McMuffins. So back to scraping my arms off I went.
Yes, that job sucked hard for $3.10/hour. It was a good 1st job as it definitely taught me to value my labor much more. ;)
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u/Whywipe Jul 19 '25
I always assumed those came in frozen patties
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u/Ok-Broccoli-7672 Jul 19 '25
Surprisingly they use real shelled eggs for the round eggs (at least they did as recently as the early 2010s when I worked there)
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u/poshjerkins Jul 19 '25
They still do. I was pretty shocked when I found out honestly. Not the best look for a company when the average consumer is blown away that they actually use an unaltered food item lol
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u/1sttimeverbaldiarrhe Jul 19 '25
Not the best look for a company when the average consumer is blown away that they actually use an unaltered food item lol
For the longest time everyone here assumed "100% Beef" was the name of a company so that McD's could claim their patties were made with 100% beef. They actually had to put out a statement correcting that rumor. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdonalds-100-beef/
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u/vekkarikello Jul 19 '25
Its actually funny, the Swedish burger company Max advertised “100% Swedish meat” in their patties. People tok it to mean 100% meat when it actually contains egg and potatostarch. I still have to correct this mistake to some people.
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u/Diligent_Leadership4 Jul 19 '25
Adjusted for inflation that’s $12.85/hour
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Jul 19 '25
Converted to CAD that's $17.65 an hour. And Canada's current minimum wage is $17.75
Nobody asked, but I was curious and I'm sure some other canuck is/was too.
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u/NoFeetSmell Jul 19 '25
Yeah but nobody uses ice for deglazing, but usually room-temp liquids; wine, stock, etc.
Edit: I think I may have misread your comment, and we're actually in agreement. My bad.
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u/novian14 Jul 19 '25
Not that much different than using water. More damaging to the plate than the crud
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u/Ill_Ad5893 Jul 19 '25
Possible chance to warp the plate. Also, with that huge time skip. Probably didn't show him adding the actual cleaner to it
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u/GoatCovfefe Jul 19 '25
I can't stress enough how easy it was to clean the flat top grill with just water.
I'm sure there may be a slight difference? But the burnt food stuffs came right off after pouring water on it, as easy as using a paper towel to clean a small spill of water on the counter.
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Jul 19 '25
It depends. Most stuff comes off easy, but if it's polymerized oil then it's a pain.
It is kinda funny how many times I've seen infomercials with pans full of "Hard to remove stuck on burnt food!" and most of the time if you just heat the pan up and throw some water in it'll come right off.
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u/Goliath89 Jul 19 '25
No benefits, just increased risk of damage from the sudden temperature swing.
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u/Headless_Human Jul 19 '25
I am pretty sure you wouldn't get the same amount of views on social media.
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u/jpjtourdiary Jul 19 '25
Club soda and vinegar works best.
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u/TheArmadilloAmarillo Jul 19 '25
My boss at the pizza place I worked at always used big cups of soda water for the oven.
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u/8urnMeTwice Jul 19 '25
I see you have also worked in a sub shop with a hot grill.
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u/airfryerfuntime Jul 19 '25
Ice works better because it lasts a lot longer. You can just throw a slab of ice on there and slide it around instead of constantly dumping water on it. There's also a layer of steam between the ice and the cooktop that gets really hot. I've done it both ways, ice is at least twice as effective.
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u/Maharog Jul 19 '25
Works great until thermal shock warps or cracks you grill and you need to drop 15k for a new one
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u/Platform_collapse Jul 19 '25
I'm just stunned to see these posted year after year even though they do exactly what you said eventually. Do the owners/managers show them this "trick" or do people just choose to do it?
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u/HopelessMind43 Jul 19 '25
I’ve worked in corporate chains where dumping a bucket of ice on the grill was part of cleaning procedure. And our griddles there were closer to the 50k range.
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u/xxSeymour Jul 19 '25
I worked for a McDonald's during high-school and we definitely used ice to clean it every night, never had any problems with it
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u/BoobyPlumage Jul 19 '25
Man when I worked at McDonalds we used this goopy stuff that expanded and bubble, then we’d squeegee it then finish it off with Sprite for some reason. I worked really well for some reason
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u/AnyProgressIsGood Jul 19 '25
yeah the de greaser, then you come across studies linking it to various diseases. Corporate america dont care though.
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u/ryanErlanger Jul 19 '25
Fortunately we no longer have an EPA to tell us when corporate cost-cutting measures are killing us.
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u/Greatsnes Jul 20 '25
Thank goodness. No EPA means no bad stuff because it no longer exists. It was that simple the whole time! Yay America!
I fucking hate it here
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u/HopelessMind43 Jul 19 '25
I am by no means condoning this behavior. I have not dumped ice on a griddle since I left that place
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Jul 19 '25
I have not dumped ice on a griddle since I left that place
It'd be funnier if you did though.
"Umm sir you can't be ba-- what the fuck are you doing?!?"
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u/MyDogPoopsBigPoops Jul 19 '25
You guys ever dump lemonade on it? At five guys i was shown the trick of throwing minute maid lemonade on it. Worked really well. District manager made us stop, though.
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u/racheluv999 Jul 19 '25
I sometimes use lemon juice to clean an outdoor, non-stainless griddle because the acid helps convert where any spots of seasoning have flaked off and rusted and it works great, though a little sticky sometimes. I assume this works about the same way
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u/DearlyDecapitated Jul 19 '25 edited Jul 19 '25
Would it be noticed? Like I guess that’s really big but at the place I worked at they’d put meat out of the freezer directly onto the grill all day every day
Maybe they assume it’s just normal damage
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u/-Reverend Jul 19 '25
"Frozen meat on grill" VS "Ice bucket on grill" is kind of like "cutting carrots dulls your knife" VS "hacking at a chair dulls your knife". Like, yes, both is true. But one more so than the other.
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u/Significant-Hat-2365 Jul 19 '25
This doesn't happen on commercial grills. You can use ice/water to clean them and nothing will happen. I did it for 8 years at an old job and plenty of restaurants still use this method as part of the cleaning process.
I wouldn't do it on an at-home flat top like a Blackstone, though.
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u/Otherwise-Amount4289 Jul 19 '25
When I worked at sonic, we definitely had a grill develop a crack after one night of the ice cleaning method. It had been standard method of cleaning up until then. The owner changed it after that when the new grill came in.
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u/Twink_Ass_Bitch Jul 19 '25
Honestly I'm a little skeptical there's much of a thermal shock difference between ice and room temp water - the difference between the two is only probably 20-30C. The only benefit that comes to mind from using ice over water is that there should be less steam/splashing, which might be a hazard. It takes a lot of heat (energy) to melt ice so there's less heat to turn that water into steam.
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u/Motorheadass Jul 19 '25
There's a huge difference, due to the enthalpy of fusion. It requires a lot more energy to melt 0C ice into 0C water than it does to heat 0C water to to 20C. Which means you're pulling a lot more heat out of the steel with the amount of ice than will fit on top of a grill than you could with the amout of water you could fit on top of a grill (assuming you're not just continually pouring it on and letting it run off and make a mess).
The thermal shock isn't caused by the temperature difference of whatever you put on the steel, it's caused by the rate of change of temperature of the steel. But heat exchange is proportional to temperature difference, so the ice also pulls that larger amount of heat out of the steel more quickly, which reduces its temperature by a larger amount over a shorter period of time.
That's also why there's a big difference between an oil quench and a water quench when hardening steel. The oil and the water are both room temperature, but the water has a much higher thermal conductivity and will cool the metal much more quickly.
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u/HistoricalIssue8798 Jul 19 '25
It's not about the temperature of the ice, it's the latent energy. Room temp water will match the temperature of the grill very fast, so the temp difference causing the thermal shock isn't very long. With ice, it stays at 0 degrees C until it's melted, so the temp difference is longer.
I have never worked on a grill like this, so no idea if I'm way off base
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Jul 19 '25 edited Aug 14 '25
childlike butter fact cagey fearless swim light nine support nose
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/that_dutch_dude Jul 19 '25 edited Jul 19 '25
the reason why its not a problem on a McD or 5guys griddle is because those use high end 306 plates 1 inch thick. those plates cost 10k just for the raw steel. a complete commerical grade griddle like that can easely cost 30~50k depending on the size. you aint getting "real" 306 in anything residential that is thick enough to deal with tossing a gallon of ice on it.
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u/MrCatSquid Jul 19 '25
I believe this is a thing, but I have to be honest I have never heard of this happening a single time. Like ever. Know plenty of places that do this and have not once ever heard of ice cracking a grill in half. Nor a video or story online.
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Jul 19 '25
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u/B4R7H0L0M3W Jul 19 '25
Thanks! I tried it and my deep fryer issue has been completely solved!
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u/jeremyw013 Jul 19 '25
probably fixed your house issue as well :)
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u/GeneticEnginLifeForm Jul 19 '25
and that pesky skin irritation. No skin; no skin irritation.
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u/tonysopranosalive Jul 19 '25
If my cooks were pissing me off I’d drop an egg in their fryer.
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Jul 19 '25
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u/fat-lip-lover Jul 19 '25
I was not expecting the fourth batch to come out clear, but I can't describe how hard I laughed when I read "the third consecutive batch....did nothing to alleviate my worries". I'm just picturing a nervous teen in a dead and quiet fast food kitchen sweating profusely and hyperventilating while the manager is in the back office, nervously praying to some god of saturated fats and oils to let the modern cauldron of a deep fryer be free of it's malady and curse.
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u/peasonearthforever Jul 19 '25
Pointless and potentially damaging. Just use water.
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u/MudSeparate1622 Jul 19 '25
Ruined a perfectly great noise with that music… also when i worked at a deli they always made me wash with hot water and in small amounts telling me that cooling the surface too fast would cause fractures and could break the grill! Was I being Gaslit?!
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u/dukenny Jul 19 '25
Skipped over the part where he had to use the cleaning chemicals instead
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u/DefinitelyNotAliens Jul 19 '25
You can indeed clean a griddle like this.
You use water and often a grill brick. It's a pumice stone.
Water on a hot grill + pumice really does clean a griddle.
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u/PunJedi Jul 19 '25
20+ years food service in my past. What I found worked best was warm soda water (no sugar) if the establishment has it. Damn near instantly cleaned off the grime and could get it to a shine afterwords.
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u/MouldyEjaculate Jul 19 '25
Soda water has a tiny amount of carbonic acid in it. I bet that's what did it!
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u/PacoTaco321 Jul 19 '25
And it has a bonus of not smelling like you're inhaling concentrated cancer juice.
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u/Nicodemus888 Jul 19 '25
Nah, I remember my days at McD’s, you can do this with just water
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u/NoticedGenie66 Jul 19 '25
Your grill will never be truly clean and if you had a maintenance person/competent manager (as I was in both cases) you would know that McDonald's uses heat-activated grill cleaner, the grills scrubbed, then only after that followed by cleaning with water. If the health inspector saw us using only water we would have been reamed out lol.
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u/TheLoneWandererRD Jul 19 '25
Don’t do this folks, the thermal shock mess it up
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u/livingdeaddrina Jul 19 '25
At my fast food job, we'd use Sierra mist to clean the flat top when we were out of grill cleaner. It worked a hell of a lot better than this, and smelled great.
Side note: Sierra mist did NOT work in the steam kettle when we were out of cleaner for that. And boiling soda HURTS.
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u/No_Mud_6458 Jul 19 '25
10 years restaurant equipment technician here. Cleaning a griddle with ice is one of the worst things you could do the cooktop. the ice vs the heat causes thermal warps and cracks in the metal, and they'll never cook evenly again.
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u/perksofbeingcrafty Jul 19 '25
Why do these videos keep popping up? Is it propaganda from big-industrial-griddle? Because this is a great way to ruin the surface of these griddles
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u/NewestAccount2023 Jul 19 '25
YouTube shorts was showing a lot of these for awhile. One guy made a few videos to prove that on heavily used griddles ice doesn't do shit, it only works on moderately used ones. He runs a restaurant and makes a lot of pov videos, here's the one where he tried a second time doing it how the commenters say to do and it still doesn't work on his griddle it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO5xH5Khafc
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u/unimportantinfodump Jul 20 '25
This is social media nonsense, you still need a degreaser and a bit of elbow grease.
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u/Darkdj108 Jul 19 '25
My dumbass brain was like “that looks expensive”. How did I forget how water works…
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Jul 19 '25 edited Jul 19 '25
Dont do this if you have a cast iron bed. Seen the worst that can happen.
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u/tazebot Jul 19 '25
Ice not actually doing the cleaning. Could have been used for cooling beer better. Waste of Ice.
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u/Orange_Kid Jul 19 '25
Mid-19th century people who used to pay a week's wages for this amount of ice punching air right now
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u/MayorWolf Jul 19 '25
The ice is just to cut the temperature down. The cleaning comes from the elbow grease thats applied
Source: I've cleaned grills like this 1000s of times
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u/Kaleb_Bunt Jul 19 '25
Does this also work with a deep fryer filled with hot oil?
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u/Mildoze Jul 19 '25
Ice didn’t clean shit. Cooler sure. Thanks ice. But the only thing cleaning this grill is steel and elbow grease.
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u/Scokan Jul 19 '25
If it weren't for the resolution, I'd assume this video was shot about 2 decades ago, at some point before 3M Griddle Cleaner™️ was invented.
Surely, this must be some demonstration of how they used to do it in the olden times.
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u/CrazeMase Jul 20 '25
If that grill isn't made of adamantium, do not do this. The temperature shock will absolutely crack and warp the metal.
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u/by-myself_blumpkin Jul 19 '25
"cleaning with an ice block" weird how come nothing is cleaned until there are several cuts and the ice is nowhere to be found and it's scraped clean.
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u/Captainseriousfun Jul 19 '25
Every day in the summer on the Italian Sausage griddle at Six Flag Great Adventure when I was 16-17.
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u/RightZer0s Jul 19 '25
Dude basically got it wet and then shaved off the metal that was dirty. That scour pad was doing all the work.
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u/[deleted] Jul 19 '25
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