"Although Foreman never confirmed exactly how much he has earned from the endorsement, Salton paid him $138 million in 1999 for the right to use his name. Prior to that, he was paid about 40% of the profits on each grill sold (earning him $4.5 million a month in payouts at its peak), yielding an estimated total of over $200 million just from the endorsement through 2011, substantially more than he earned as a boxer."
Man, those grills are useful. What I like about their engineering is you can run them on a typical kitchen circuit without worrying about a circuit breaker being triggered. This is not always true with other appliances. Typically stuff that can heat is very power consuming. Even washing machines and stuff like that can sometimes trip breakers (heat + spin). So yeah, it can be convenient.
They were also incredibly easy to clean. Whoever designed it was intimately aware of both the struggle of cleaning a grill grate and not being able to fit pans in dishwasher or standard kitchen sink.
The predecessors to the Salton design in the 80s suffered this problem. The hot sandwich makers and grills with no drainage had depressions that were hard to clean. They learned from the flawed competition.
Hulk Hogan told the story of how this was brought to him first to endorse but she insisted it was stupid and that instead he endorse the Hulk Hogan Thunder Mixer, a handheld blender.
He rolled his eye the whole time he told the story.
Even if it's true, it's so disgraceful of him telling the story in a way that he throws his spouse under the bus for what was really his decision to make. I don't know why I'd expect grace from Hulk Hogan though.
I mean... I consider myself a versatile home cook, and I've owned and used more products similar to the Thunder Mixer than products similar to the George Foreman grill. Sometimes it's a mystery what people buy. Why would you buy a separate appliance rather than a ridged grill pan for your stove top?
Some friends of mine back then had a reason I think may have been pretty common: they lived an apartment building that didn't allow combustion grills on the balconies. And coincidentally this sort of rental property is exactly the type to have an absolutely fake junk "extractor" for handling smoke in the kitchen. So they could put the Foreman on the patio and do an okish job with some steaks or burgers without smoking up the whole place.
This was exactly my reason when I lived in a tiny apartment in Boston having no exhaust or fan in the kitchen itself. Put the Foreman Grill by a window with some burgers cooking, job done.
There's warm weekends in Boston when strolling along one can look into the alleys and see a dozen Foremen Grills in action on the fire escapes. Fond memories of those days.
I have both a cast iron grill pan and a Forman. I use the Forman frequently because it heats up fast, cleans easy, and reliably cooks both sides at once…without oil, butter etc.
The grill pan has none of those attributes and can’t press a grilled cheese.
Yes it takes up counter space and is ultimately going to the landfill. I wish that were otherwise, but for me, they aren’t deal breakers.
Maybe precisely because the guy endorsing one product is much more relatable than the guy endorsing the other.
Nothing against Hulk Hogan, he is certainly one of a kind, but when it comes to my food I'd take advice from a down to earth type like Foreman a thousand times over that from a persona as detached from real life as Hogan's.
But they also don't break as often. And can hold a larger capacity. And don't spill. Admittedly, the thought of cleanup has put me off the occasional late night margarita...
Yep. I paid something like $650 for a Vitablend at a restaurant supply store about 20 years ago. That's the commercial version of a Vitamix. Thing is a tank, and has blended many many gallons of soups, smoothies, grain into flour, etc. over the years. Cleanup is hot water and a couple squirts of dishwasher liquid and run it on high a few seconds. Had to replace the jar a few years ago, but the base will outlive me.
The other huge advantage: you can get parts for decades. With good kitchen gear you want to buy it once for life. Need a new cap, or jug, for a 2001 model? No big deal. You dont get that with the stuff from Target. (It is also not correlated to price, eg my zojirushi rice cooker offers the same capability but was way cheaper than the fancy korean rice cookers in the store.)
Steaks being cooked naturally drain juice. The entire concept of searing a steak "sealing" the juices in implies a cooking paradigm that simply doesn't hold up to experimentation. You want to cook off water mass from a good steak—it's better flavor, better texture, and you're left with far less grease in your soup-catcher.
If you cook enough steaks, it's quite hard to get a dry one, and you can get excellent texture and taste despite draining the "juice" (which is like 80% of why you salt the steak to begin with—moisture = less even and harder to control cooking which results in a chewier crust).
I think the issue is that the weight of the lid and top grill pressing down on the steak squeezes a lot more juice out than if you grilled the steak on regular grill that heats from below.
You usually press down on it or use a weight with a regular grill. You want a crust from a Maillard reaction on the outer surfaces, with a less-cooked interior.
I do not do that. I use the reverse sear technique popularized by Kenji Lopez-Alt. This involves heating the steak to near-doneness over indirect heat, followed by an intense sear over direct heat. A brief rest period in between allows an even better sear, as the surface has a bit of time to dry out and the internal temperature to drop a bit, enabling more time over high heat.
We had one on a yacht I crewed that did ecotour sorta sails. When we'd catch a small tuna, after the trips I'd butterfly it and George Foreman it. No added oil just right on the Teflon cooking surface and texture and taste would come out sorta like fried chicken. It was great
I always sear meat on a flat top first anyway, but the advantage with an actual grill is that it has flames which help seal the outside of the meat quickly. Much more so than the heat radiating from the Foreman Grill grooves. Without a quick sear, you end up with a rubbery and dry piece of meat.
Meats don't really seal unless you're literally tarring them with char, and besides, juices leak from the side just fine. You really want to steam off the water content of a steak to get a better texture and fewer grease-runs. The entire meme about searing is literally just a decently crunchy texture. Flip steaks as much as you want.
The high "sear" temperature mostly implies a faster (and easy-to-follow) cook-time, but it still requires salting the steak to drain as much moisture as possible. It's certainly the smarter texhniwue, but not because it seals juices in.
(Also, "searing" a steak does in fact slow the rate of water loss, so it is easier to control cook-quality and easier to cook whilst distracted. But this undermines my main point that water content actually ruins the steak, and that you can get the same texture and taste with a different technique.)
First of all, I'm talking about searing on a flat top. Which doesn't char. And it does keep in the moisture. Especially if you've got fat on the side of the meat. But the best reason to do this is not to hold in the water, but to get a consistently even temperature in the final steak.
It is not a fast process. The steak needs to be rested at room temperature for an hour. Then seared 2 minutes each side, maximum heat, seasoning before you turn it down. Taken off the flat top or cast iron pan, which you deglaze, and pour over the steak. Rested another 30 minutes. Return to a cast iron pan and put in the oven at 450F for 8 minutes for a 1" steak rare, plus 2-3 minutes to medium rare. (11 minutes for a 1" ribeye to MR).
What happens is that the outside is seasoned brown, well cooked and most of the juice stays in, but the interior fat melts down and you end up cutting through a piece of meat that is exactly the same color and temperature from the inside to the very edge of the outside.
If you do want to cook on a grill, obviously don't grease-stain it by flipping it a lot or trying to sear it there. Put your cast iron pan on the grill, sear it in that, and then finish it on the grates for flavor and char.
I'm just pointing out you can get the same food with a quarter (at most) of the prep time and twice the flipping if you approach it experimentally at the same heat. Very much including basting. If you think steakhouses let steaks sit out before cooking them you're nuts—they might get nuked for five seconds for approximately the same effect. Letting them sit is just a convenience while prepping the rest of dinner.
Also, tenderizing the meat is about 10x as effective as letting it rest at room temperature. Not only does it warm the meat much faster, it reduces cook time, draws moisture out, and improves the crust. A minute of beating the shit out of the steak can trivially improve on an hour of sitting out (as if we have the time most days!). The grid-slice pattern is also very effective, even if it looks trashy. It's trashy because it's cheap and it works so well any cheap steakhouse will do it to obscure the shitty produce. Just make sure to do the tenderizing before you apply the salt.
Of course if you enjoy cooking, don't let my advice ruin it. Food is a lot more enjoyable if you feel satisfied eating it. Not everyone needs to optimize for cook-time.
The foreman grill was not meant for seasoned steak cookers, it was typically for college kids or first time apartment dwellers. It had it's time and place and it was obviously not meant for you in this current time and place.
A ridged grill pan like OP suggested does the same, or to the extent it collects underneath it steams part of your steak, or if it fills to the point it is touching the steak again it partly boils it for some of the cook time. The Foreman grill sears it more like a real open grill by letting the water drain away instead of having to boil off for part of the cooking. A regular flat pan does some of this too since the water is pushed out to the sides faster and boils off away from the steak letting it sear better.
Hulk Hogan also destroyed gawker because he was too cowardish to admit he's a sex freak. Obviously Peter Thiel was involved because he's too cowardish to admit he's gay, but the takeaway is that our society is run by toddlers who never learned to regulate their emotions (let alone manage the wealth a capitalist society allegedly demands. Eg people outside of Buffet demanding to be taxed more and Chuck Feeney making the gates foundation look like money-grubbing assholes).
Gawker destroyed itself because they let a reckless drug addict make editorial decisions while high and drunk which ended in the demise of the company. Fortunately that editor has recovered and has a neat blog/newsletter that focuses on substance abuse.
Gawker still acted more mature in terms of the defamatory content than any given social network. This is as clear a case of revenge-murder as you can find. I just want to know who convinced Hulk Hogan anyone cares about him who doesn't already love him. As far as I know he's still the mustache guy of unknown import who was in that funny nanny movie in the nineties I saw at age four. who cares if he swings?
This was obviously about a man's insecurity leveraging the courts to destroy a publicly-valuable business beyond any reasonable conception of justice. Somehow the new york times was never held to the same standard when they published blatant lies and enabled the invasion of iraq and a million murdered.
Here is a very brief excerpt from a lot of shocking testimony from Gawker's editor; it was Gawker's own self-destructive behavior that destroyed them. Without testimony like this they would still be operating:
> “Can you imagine a situation where a celebrity sex tape would not be newsworthy?” asked the lawyer, Douglas E. Mirell.
It was more than just Gawker, it was a whole collection of blogs that I’d say were indeed ‘valuable’. The whole story is too much to convey in a post here, but Wikipedia has good (or, at least, comprehensive) articles about it.*
I’m what TwoPhonesOneKid calls a ‘centrist idiot’ in their peer comment (hey, look, I’m treating them with decorum!), and I don’t think it was more valuable than the NYT, but Gawker Media was a blog staple with a wide reach, and those blogs did real journalism in a wide range of fields in addition to click bait. Some of them arguably recovered under new ownership, but many did not.
Gawker was a far more valuable institution than both of the above. I'm not sure how you could claim otherwise: both papers just regurgitate ap headlines with misanthropic assholes managing the editing. Gawker at least managed to break news and contribute to discourse beyond the ivy-league toadies that contribute nothing substantial beyond dogmatic reverwnce for broken institutions that were wildly out of date a hundred years ago.
Centrist idiots blathering about institutional integrity and decorum destroyed this country. I refuse to let them gain power again. I far prefer gossip rags to imperial stooges: at least they're honest about their dishonesty. They also never stooped to the level of the new york times endorsing an obviously illegal invasion.
Granted, both are equally willing to cater towards the american demand for blood rather than justice. But at least I can blame the poeple actually at the capitol for january sixth. Who the hell can I blame for the mass-complacency and dogmatism of college-educated liberals aside from the very same ignorant mass? Until a better scapegoat arrives, the editorial boards of ivy-league-catering newspapers will have to do.
Why do people not read manufacturing consent? It's the only text american adults should be reading. Everything else doesn't matter.
Weird attribution of morality when buffet gave $40B to the gates foundation. Also, aren't we all toddlers who never learned to regulate their emotions? You and me just cause less hubris because we don't have as much power and the time to convince ourselves we deserve it.
It's interesting that we ended up with Hogan, Ventura, and Trump as figures in our politics. I feel like the last time a republic got to that point, there was a lot of lead in the water. I guess now it's mostly plastic in the brain.
Yea it turns out when you divorce politics from anything that matters it just becomes reality tv. Americans are too moronic to wield the power they claim today so it's hard to feel anything negative about this.
I'm not sure it's fair to mock the public figures, because it's not like the guys in between them were anything particularly remarkable either. Democracy doesn't select skilled leaders, it selects charismatic ones with 'flexible moral values' of the sort that are useful for gaining sufficient backers. It's fairly predictable that democracies with relatively wide suffrage would trend towards electing pop figures.
This also is exactly democracy was mostly felt to be an unsustainable system by the ancient philosophers. And in reading Plato's assessment of democracy, and its cycles, in "The Republic", he sounds like much more like a prophet than a philosopher.
Are we forgetting the original one, Ronald Reagan? Guy was a literal middling actor, whose only claim to fame was snitching on Communist sympathizers in Hollywood when it was cool.
This theory has held up poorly to other theories, such as the federal legalization of abortion. Positing a single cause, even a single dominating cause, is an incredibly, incredibly hard claim to demonstrate. I do believe that unleading gasoline had widespread social impacts, but this narrative is just lazy reduction with no benefit.
Personally, I think the easiest theory is simply economic prosperity. Most American problems these days can be described in terms of relationship to wealth. changes in education take decades to reflect in aggregate effectiveness. If nothing changes, I think we'll be facing a similarly-violent time period for likely the rest of our lives, even if we aren't there yet.
Not sure, I’m a bit too young but the standards seem to have been much higher back in those days. Reagan’s [public] behavior would still be pretty tame nowadays.
Of course broadcasting your deranged random thoughts to the whole world in the middle of the night wasn’t really and option and listening to Nixon’s tapes the way they behaved in private was well.. quite something. I don’t even believe that Nixon was especially egregious either he just decided to record everything anyone said in his office due to whatever reasons.
And then you had career politicians like Johnson who might have been even more vulgar than Trump..
> but the standards seem to have been much higher back in those days.
He was a service-cutting, union-busting, lunatic military hawk guided by Nancy's astrologer. Sure, he's not as overtly and in-your-face as bad as Trump (who could be?) but that doesn't preclude him being a horror show in and of himself.
As a former combat sports fan, I find it increasingly difficult to watch. These guys (and gals) are doing enormous brain damage to themselves & their opponents. Foreman seemed to have been an outlier that came out OK, but listen to the slurring & garbled speech that comes from any other old fighter. I know someone who's a friend with a longtime UFC fighter- he had an anecdote about the guy putting his kids to bed and temporarily forgetting their names. Great fights are very entertaining, but ethically I really find it difficult to be a fan these days
The ones that are well compensated are the ones that survived high school and probably college football, where they weren't really compensated that much at all.
In high school, the football coaches would nag me at the beginning of the football season to join the team -- understandable since I was an example of the kind of wall of muscle and flesh you wanted in your defensive lines. I never joined because it didn't seem like much fun to me to be constantly slamming into other guys of that size.
More recently, I ran into one of the guys who did join the team, played defensive tackle, and went on to also play in college. Having also relatively recently seen up-close the effects of TBI, alzheimers, dementia -- even a short interaction made it obvious he was suffering heavily from hitting his head so much; the sad part is that he's the same age as me, and that by the time I hit middle age, he's probably going to be dead. Well, that's one of the sad parts, the other big one is that his reward for all that is two jobs in retail to try to make ends meet because he never got paid much for playing, and the TBIs made it hard to find a high-paying career.
I think most folk would gladly shorten their lifespan by decades for a million dollars today - the ultimate sacrifice for future generational wealth? Not that a million gets you anything substantial anymore...
Ya the issue is you shorten your lifespan up front by playing from a young age, but only have a small chance of actually getting the generational wealth. Typically, this a sacrifice your parents make for you on your behalf because they sign you up before you really know the downsides and by the time you can know the downsides, you've got your head too many times to be able to figure out the downsides.
Do you have hard stats on this? I play an unholy amount of soccer, moreso for fun, but most of my life. I've seldom seen any concussions. I'm confident they can and would happen, but I'd love to dive into the veracity of your claim. Especially over the lifetime of play, not just at the professional level.
A lot of football (American) players get their concussions in early, like highschool and college.
Personally, I would be interested to see a type of soccer where you can only use the feet -- head and upper body contact would be disallowed. It won't be the same game, but it would be kind of fun to see how players would adapt to those rules. There would probably be quite a bit more acrobatics involved to handle the ball being in the air.
I suspect disallowing all upper body contact would lead to more goals. Posting a defender on the goal line would be less effective.
> There would probably be quite a bit more acrobatics involved to handle the ball being in the air.
I think that could end up being disallowed, too because of the risk of feet hitting heads, especially inside the penalty area. Think of the body movements of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepak_takraw but without the net separating teams.
RIP. Was a big fan of Foreman growing up, even though his initial heyday was before my time. Which is one of the reasons I'm fond of him today - he was 48 years old when he was last heavyweight boxing champ.
Every time I'm feeling "too old" to do something physical, I try to remember the baddest man on the planet was older than I am now - a fact that is still crazy to achy 'old' me now.
If you're interested in seeing an interesting conversation one of his sons has with brilliant comedian Daniel Tosh, where they talk about his legendary father, check out:
What a cultured man, raised by a true man of God. George Foreman is a testament to the best of humanity, and this one son (at least) is a testament to that humanity.
Thanks! It's getting late so I only watched the first 20 mins for now, but agreed. He obviously had a great upbringing. I'll check out the rest tomorrow.
That aside, I used to love Tosh.0, and didn't even know he was still around. I'm a little sad to see him becoming and even sounding like Bill Maher. The old edge pusher is gone, understandably. We all got old and I hate it :).
He's no Bill Maher, friend. Tosh despises Trump, because Tosh has that surfer chill and believes in being kind.
And I still think he's super funny, if not quite so edgy. His "WWJD rubber bracelet" bit has one of my favorite punchlines ever.
If you want to see a great (IMO) younger comedian, check out Greer Barnes. I discovered him yesterday and I've not laughed that hard at a comedian in quite a while. He is next-level brilliant.
I don't even know Maher's politics, I just meant Tosh was beginning to sound like and even talk like him(the cadence/pausing etc). He used to be a real fast talker. One could also argue he's even starting to look that way.
All I meant to imply is that he and we are getting old, but it is weird to me how much he sounds like Maher to me in that clip.
Amen. Having dabbled in martial arts and had the good pleasure of hitting my mid thirties, his ability to win at 48 is nothing short of jaw dropping. Shouldn’t be possible.
I didn't know who George Foreman was a little kid, so I saw him in the commercials for the George Foreman Grill and assumed that he was the inventor.
I was very confused when I, at age 11, read a comic published in 1990 (I think) and saw an advertisement for (I think) a boxing video game with George Foreman on the cover. I thought "huh, I wonder if he's related to the guy who invented that grill on TV".
I asked my mom and she laughed, and that day I truly learned about celebrity endorsements.
I can live 50 lifetimes and it wouldn’t be enough to understand celebrity endorsements… Foreman was one of my favorite athletes growing up but unless he was the greatest chef on earth I wouldn’t touch his grill with a wooden stick
I actually had one for a couple years when I lived alone in a fairly small apartment. I really liked it; it cooked hamburgers well enough and it was super cheap, like $15-20 when I bought it during a sale.
Obviously a full-sized grill would have been better, but I didn't really have that as an option in my apartment. It was easy to clean, cooked stuff relatively quickly, and neatly fit right next to my toaster. I think it's a good product for what it is.
Why they got a retired boxer to promote it, I have no idea.
Oh no question, I saw him in interviews years later and he seemed like a pretty decent dude. He also made fun of himself on King of the Hill, which always has my eternal respect.
And the endorsement definitely worked. It's possible that the grill might have still been successful without his branding, but we don't know that what-if, we just know that the grills that had his branding definitely were successful.
He’s an everyday man grilling in the backyard with his kids and buddies.
To the day he died, He had a very clean image, so no baggage and a whole lot of goodwill. What more do you want from a pitchman?
I get that re: celebrity endorsements, I've never understood why someone would buy a product just because a celebrity is in the commercials.
Now, that out of the way, the Foreman Grill was/is? a nifty little product that actually worked really well. I was gifted one, and despite having a really nice grill and big yard, sometimes I just want to be quick and lazy and bang something out.
I mean I am sure the endorsement gave it a recognized name, but people forget it was basically the Instant Pot if its day. You could buy George Foreman grill cookbooks in stores. It very much became its own thing, to the point many people know of George Foreman because of the grill he endorsed.
Then there are the celebrities who are famous entirely for hawking products on TV: Billy Mays and Vince Offer (aka "the shamwow guy", aka "the slap chop guy")
The goal of the endorsement is to catch your attention through entertainment.
Then you need something to trigger them to say yes, I want that.
Aside - many people want something easy for them to use, which this thing was. Julia Child's success is a great lesson of a very good chef making it simple & showing mistakes.
as another comment said, it makes for a decent indoors apartment grill. i used to use one all the time to make hamburgers or grilled cheese in college.
I only just discovered that he didn't invent or at least own the company that made the grill. Not being American, I had no real idea who he was outside of it.
I didn't think much about George Foreman until I watched When We Were Kings. For me, he was just as interesting as Ali, and I was so impressed with how he returned and reinvented himself after the loss to Ali that he was my personal reference point for resilience and personal evolution. RIP.
the foreman grills gets a lot of flack but it's a damn good cooking utensil and if not for him I'm not sure it would have been as publicized as it was.
I don't know what 100% Christian is intended to imply here, although it's obviously critical.
Biblical christianity isn't for the perfect or righteous, but for sinners. Christ rejoices more over the one sinner that repents than the 99 who need no repentance (John 15).
I don't know much about Foreman. But, his fifth marriage did last 40 years. Seems like, at some point, his perspective on marriage/commitment got more aligned with biblical wisdom.
Being a Christian celebrity doesn't require you to stick to Christian values. It's much more important to proclaim your membership than to live it. It's like wearing a team jersey without playing the game. The appearance matters more than the practice.
Christianity in America is like a brand - more about identity and affiliation than discipleship or doctrine.
A lot of the replies to this comment seem to assume that the "5 marriages" component is meant to cast Foreman's christianity as hypocritical, when I think it's more a commentary on how christian values affect relationship stability.
I say this also as someone who's left the church, and whose religious parents and inlaws are multiply-divorced.
George Foreman III demonstrates how deserving GF was of all his success. He and GF3 are the best of humanity. And Tosh being a very kind and open-hearted human being, too, makes the conversation not only interesting but simply enjoyable, especially for its insights into his legendary father's life.
A good guy and all around gentleman. My uncle Bryan met him in Topeka in the early 80s and encouraged his career in photography by posing for a few "fighting stance" photos for the local paper.
In a gerontological context:
It would interesting to understand more about his genealogy. Does the age of 76 mark an above or below average age in his family and their historical lifespan?
As someone who has experienced great success in life, and also been (at least at one point) in peak physical shape, the cause of his demise seems especially interesting to me.
It's a great story, for sure, and I think I watched it live. The way he let his lead left jab linger to cover Moorer's eyes and then slipped in his hammer of a right to KHTFO was brilliant.
But I'm partial to Billy Mills 1964 10km gold medal in Tokyo. I love how the co-announcer loses his mind on the American broadcast of the race, because the two favorites were favored so heavily.
Besides boxing and his grill, the thing I always remembered about him was that he named all 5 of his sons "George". (I see on wikipedia, they have numbers and nicknames).
I can understand having criticisms of HN and pg, and I understand being harshly critical when you find a serious security problem, but surely there's a better way to express both of these.
Wasn’t the whole white/grey hat ethos based on the idea that if a security flaw exists, someone will use it, so we can help everyone by making them public back doors instead of secret backdoors so anyone who cared about security would know what to fix.
This guy is annoying, but his behavior seems in line with that
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Foreman
Not sure if luck or stars just aligned. But that is some legit naming rights. Kudos to maybe, and I mean it... one of the best at it.