What Are Drip Pans & How Do They Improve Grilling?
Updated: January 2025
For charcoal grills, drip pans go under the cooking grates. They catch grease and drippings. This helps stop flare-ups and keeps the grill clean. They’re also useful for indirect cooking, adding moisture, or collecting flavorful juices for sauces.
From tasty gravy to herbs on the grill, knowing how to use these will keep your barbecue guests coming back for more.
We often think of these pans for our ovens and stoves to keep them clean. However, we should not forget their important role in grilling.
Grill drip pans can be a game-changer in making barbecue taste even more delicious while keeping our patios nice and clean. Below, we highlight three reasons why grill masters like yourself should use drip pans for your barbecue grill.
1. Catch the Dripping for an Extra Flavor Punch
Some of our favorite barbecue dishes, like baby back ribs, are rich in natural fat. These fats often drip off the ribs during the cooking process. This is where a drip pan becomes incredibly useful.
With a carefully positioned metal drip pan, you can collect most of these drippings and up the ante for already delicious dishes.
Use Fat Drippings to Make Sauce and Gravy
Grill masters, you’ll change the grilling game by saving the fat drippings in your drip pan and using it as the base for a delicious sauce or gravy. This gravy can be poured directly over your meat fresh off the grill, or it can be a great accompaniment to mashed potatoes if you like potatoes along with your barbecue meat (and who doesn’t?!).
Experienced grill masters might even use these pans to cook potatoes and their other side dish favorites. You should give this trick a try to save room on your grill at Thanksgiving while making tasty favorites like pumpkin cheddar scalloped potatoes.
Even though gravy is a super popular use for drippings, there are other ways that drippings can be used. They can add a flavorful and rich kick to some of your favorite soup stocks, too.
However, it’s also important to know that not all meats will give us the same great drippings. For instance, lean pork and lamb do not produce as many drippings as some cuts of beef and poultry.
2. Indirect Grilling
Indirect grilling is a unique twist on grilling, and to do it well, you definitely need a drip pan.
What is indirect grilling? Indirect grilling happens when you use a grill divider to set coals ablaze on one side of the grill while the other cooks by means of indirect heat.
With indirect grilling, you can use the ingredients in your drip pan to infuse the meat on your grill with an added dash of flavor and more moisture.
The Ins and Outs of Indirect Grilling
Once you get the hang of it, indirect grilling is a relatively easy skill to master. However, it can be important to remember these tips and tricks the first few times.
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The first trick is to remember that your pan will go between your piping hot coal and the meat on the grill.
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The second trick is to make sure that your pan has a healthy helping of liquid. You don't want to run out of juice while you are cooking.
Water is a great source of liquid for your drip pan and is guaranteed to keep your cook as juicy as possible. You can also include wine or juice; plus, we even like the citrusy kick that we get by adding a splash (or two or three) of an IPA to our drip pan.
Once you have stocked up on liquid, the rest is up to you. We like to add some rosemary and thyme to our drip pan, too.
In fact, rosemary garlic chicken is one of our family's favorite weeknight dinners. Some people like other herbs, and others love adding veggies to their drip pan. Tangy marinades are also a popular choice to add to your pan.
Keeping meat moist is important for all cuts of meat, but it is especially important for gamier cuts like venison, which is one of our Christmas favorites.
3. Drip Pans Are for More Than Just Flavor
Yes, we definitely love the flavor boost that drip pans give us! Drip pans, though, are for more than just flavor. As much as we love barbecuing, one of our least favorite parts about barbecuing is the cleanup. There can be a mess everywhere, including on the cedar planks of our deck.
The good news is that a drip pan makes the cleanup dramatically easier. Instead of having to get down on our hands and knees to scrub up the deck, we can just take our drip pan out and bring it to our kitchen sink.
Drip Pans Make Grill Cleanup Even Easier
The process can be even smoother if you buy the right drip pan, like the Kick Ash Drip Pan. We definitely recommend investing in our great stainless steel drip pans instead of a plastic drip pan or a disposable one. Not surprisingly, high heat from a grill and plastic is not always a great combination.
Our Kick Ash Drip Pan is the perfect replacement for Traeger drip pans or the one that comes with your charcoal grill. The cleanup is easier, and Kick Ash drip pans last much longer.
Another great thing about our pan is that it works on almost any grill, assuming you have a minimum two-inch clearance between the cooking grate and heat deflector.
How to Clean Drip Pans After Grilling
After you’ve created a feast for your family and friends, you’ll want to clean up your drip pan too. Our stainless steel drip pan is dishwasher safe, so you can just throw it in the dishwasher and go on your merry way.
However, if you run into cleanup snafus with your drip pan, just use a splash of vinegar or grab some baking soda — both are great at cutting through stubborn grease and unwanted stains.
Branching Out with New Accessories
We all have our favorite things to barbecue and a tried and true method of getting great results. Even great barbecue chefs can benefit from shaking up their routines.
One way to do this is to add a stainless steel Kick Ash Drip Pan. This drip pan will let you add a host of new flavors to your favorite dishes, either with hearty dripping-based gravies or through indirect grilling, and will also make cleanup a breeze.