LANNEY Flat Skewers vs Bamboo Skewers

Short answer, if you're standing in the aisle right now trying to decide: I switched from bamboo skewers to a 12-pack of LANNEY flat stainless steel skewers about two years ago, and I have not bought a bag of bamboo since. Not because bamboo is useless, it isn't, but because the two tools solve different problems, and most of us grilling on a Tuesday night don't actually have the problem bamboo was built to solve.

I'm Curtis Boone. I spent over twenty years on a fire department in coastal North Carolina, and I've spent about that many summers running a grill on the weekends for whoever showed up hungry. I've soaked bamboo skewers in water for thirty minutes like the box tells you, watched them still catch fire on the ends, and pulled a skewer of chicken off the grate only to have every piece spin in a circle when I tried to flip it. The LANNEY flat skewers fixed both of those headaches for me, and once I saw how much less I was fighting my own dinner, I never went back. Let's get into exactly where each one earns its keep, because I don't think either tool is worthless, they just fit different nights.

	LANNEY Flat Skewers	Bamboo Skewers
Material	Stainless steel, flat cross-section	Wood, round cross-section
Food grip when flipping	Flat sides lock food in place, no spinning	Food rotates freely around the round shaft
Reusability	12 skewers reused for years, dishwasher safe	Single use, tossed after one cookout
Fire risk on the grill	None, metal doesn't burn or char	Tips scorch or catch even after soaking
Prep time before grilling	None, ready straight out of the drawer	20 to 30 minutes soaking to reduce burning
Length	17 inches, with a bonus 14 inch set included	Usually 10 to 12 inches per skewer
Cost over a grilling season	One 12.99 pack covers the whole summer and beyond	New bag every few cookouts adds up over a season
Cleanup	Rinse or drop straight in the dishwasher	Straight to the trash or compost bin
Best for	Regular grillers, kabobs, shrimp, thick cuts of meat	One-off parties, appetizers, kids' skewers

Where LANNEY Wins

The flat shape is the whole story here. Round skewers, whether they're bamboo or round metal, let food spin around the shaft the second you try to turn it. You end up flipping the skewer and the chicken just rotates back to the same side it was already on, so half your kabob gets a nice sear and the other half stays pale and undercooked. The LANNEY skewers are flat and about a quarter inch wide, which means each chunk of meat or vegetable sits on a flat surface instead of balancing on a round pole. When I turn the skewer, the food turns with it. That sounds small until you've stood over a hot grill trying to coax a stubborn piece of chicken to rotate with the back of a fork while everything else on the skewer keeps cooking without it.

The other place LANNEY pulls ahead is durability, and this is the one that actually saved me money once I sat down and did the math. I bought my set of these stainless flat skewers during a season when I was hosting a lot of Sunday cookouts for the guys from my old station, and they've been through easily sixty or seventy grill sessions since then. They go straight into the dishwasher after use, no soaking, no worrying about mildew or splinters, and they still look close to new sitting in my drawer today. A bag of bamboo skewers, by comparison, is a one-and-done purchase most of the time. You buy a fifty pack for a party, use maybe twenty of them, and the rest sit in a kitchen drawer until they're brittle and snap the next time you try to use them a year later.

There's also a length advantage that doesn't get talked about enough. The LANNEY set runs 17 inches, with a bonus 14 inch set thrown in for smaller cuts or a smaller grill grate, which gives you more room to load real portions of chicken thigh, shrimp, or steak tips without everything bunching up against the handle end. Most bamboo skewers top out around 10 or 12 inches, which is fine for cherry tomatoes and cubed pineapple but starts to feel cramped once you're trying to build a full dinner kabob with three or four ingredients on it. I've had bamboo skewers so short that the last piece of onion was hanging half off the tip, and it fell straight into the coals the moment I lifted the grate lid.

And then there's the fire risk, which is the part that matters most to me given my old job. Even after a full soak, bamboo tips still char, and every so often a tip will catch a small flame right at the edge of the grate, especially if the grill is running hot for a good sear. It's not a big fire, I'm not saying your yard is in danger, but it means smoke where you don't want it and a burnt taste creeping onto the end pieces of food. Stainless steel doesn't have that problem at all. I can run my LANNEY skewers directly over hot coals or a screaming hot gas burner and never think twice about the metal itself doing anything but conducting heat evenly through to the center of the meat, which actually helps thicker cuts cook a little faster from the inside out.

One more thing worth mentioning is comfort in the hand. The flat handle end on the LANNEY skewers gives you a real grip point, so when you're loading eight or nine skewers at once for a family cookout, they don't roll around on the cutting board while you're trying to thread the next piece of chicken. Bamboo skewers roll if you set them down for even a second, and I've chased more than one across the kitchen counter and onto the floor while my hands were covered in marinade. It's a small thing, but small things add up when you're prepping dinner for six people on a weeknight and just want to get the food on the grill before everyone's stomach starts growling.

I also ran the cost math out over a full year, since that's the kind of thing twenty years of a firehouse budget teaches you to actually sit down and do. A dozen bamboo skewers run you maybe two or three dollars, but if you grill kabobs even twice a month, you're rebuying that bag six or eight times a season, which puts you close to twenty dollars before summer's even over, and you're still throwing every stick away. The LANNEY set costs 12.99 one time, and two summers in, mine still work exactly like they did the day I opened the box. That math is the real reason I stopped restocking bamboo in my kitchen drawer.

Where Bamboo Wins

I'll give bamboo its due, because an honest comparison has to. If you're hosting a big party and need forty small appetizer skewers of cheese cubes and cherry tomatoes for people to grab off a platter, cheap bamboo skewers are the right call. You're not reusing them, you don't want to hand a guest a bare metal point after the food's gone, and the cost per skewer works out to a few cents. Nobody wants to wash sixty metal skewers after a graduation party, and honestly, nobody expects you to.

Bamboo is also lighter and a little safer to hand to kids for something like fruit kabobs at a birthday party, since a dull wooden tip is a lot more forgiving than a sharp flat steel point if a seven year old decides to wave it around the yard. I learned that lesson watching my grandkids run around with skewers at a Fourth of July gathering, and I was glad it was bamboo in their hands that day, not the LANNEY set. And if you only fire up the grill two or three times a year, spending twelve dollars on a set of skewers you might use once feels like overkill when a two dollar bag of bamboo does the job just fine for that single cookout.

There's one more spot bamboo has an edge, and that's presentation for cold or room-temperature appetizers, things like caprese skewers with cherry tomatoes, mozzarella, and basil that never touch the grill at all. A thin wooden skewer looks the part on a party tray in a way a wide flat steel skewer doesn't, since the flat metal shape is really built for grilling, not for stacking bite-sized pieces for a buffet spread. If that's the kind of entertaining you do most, keep a box of bamboo around for that purpose specifically, and save the LANNEY set for the actual grill.

Who Should Buy Which

If you grill kabobs, shrimp, or chunks of meat and vegetables more than a couple times a month, buy the LANNEY flat skewers and be done with the aisle debate. You'll spend more up front, that 12.99 pack costs more than a single bag of bamboo, but you won't be buying replacements every month, and your food will actually cook evenly because it isn't spinning every time you turn it. I keep mine in the same drawer as my tongs and my spatula because they've earned a permanent spot there, not a seasonal one that gets cleared out come fall.

If you're hosting one big cookout this summer and don't see yourself grilling kabobs regularly after that, or if you need a stack of disposable skewers for a crowd of kids at a party, bamboo still has a place in your kitchen drawer. Just soak them properly, don't cut corners there, thirty minutes minimum, and know going in that you're buying a one-time convenience rather than a tool that pays for itself over a whole season of cookouts.

My honest take after running both for years side by side: keep a small stash of bamboo for cold appetizer trays and big one-off parties, but let the LANNEY flat skewers be the ones you actually reach for on a normal weeknight when you want kabobs on the table in twenty minutes with no soaking, no spinning, and no scorched tips to worry about. That's how I've settled it in my own kitchen, and it's held up through more cookouts than I can count.

I stopped fighting my kabobs the day I stopped using round skewers. Flat sides, no spinning, that's the whole trick nobody tells you about.