There’s a budding chef in your life and you know it. You’ve heard it all: MasterChef, My Kitchen Rules, and every show Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver has been featured in. This year, let ’em know how much you care with a gadget made for their passion.
Sunbeam Big Fill Toasty Maker
Price: $70
Chefs start small and easy, and nothing is easier than making a jaffle or toasty, requiring merely two pieces of bread and a filling of your choice.
Anyone who’s ever had a ham and cheese sandwich knows how much these pockets of awesomeness are, and if someone is starting out in the kitchen, designing the best toasties will get them accustomed to playing with lots of ingredients to make the best hot sandwich ever. EVER.
Lavazza Minu
Price: $99
Instant coffee needn’t be bad or expensive, a fact that Lavazza’s Minu demonstrated this year with a one hundred buck pod-based coffee machine, and pods that could be found in supermarkets everywhere.
The machine couldn’t easier to use: simply fill the water tank, load the pod in the tray, close it, put a coffee cup under the spout, wait for the machine to warm up, and then push the release knob, dispersing the coffee until you pull it back, switching it off. Easy.
Sodastream Play
Price: $99
Sodastream has been around for ages, but the gadget is on the return, now that people are drinking more and more water, with bubbly water the in thing right now.
But while it may have been made for sparkling water in mind, there’s more a budding chef can do with the gadget, such as make their own cola and bubbly drinks of all kinds.
Find a fruit, pulp or juice it, boil it with sugar to make a syrup, and wait for it to cool. From there, make your soda water and add your syrup, and you’ll have your very own soda flavour.
Kambrook PrepFast food processor
Price: $130
Knife skills are one of those things an amateur chef will get better at as time goes on and experience is gained, but if they can’t wait and need carrots, zucchini, and all manner of things chopped for them now, a food processor should be grabbed. In fact, if they’re making anything, a food processor speeds up time in the kitchen considerably, slicing, dicing, and blending ingredients for you to work with quickly.
Kambrook’s PrepFast provides a not-so-expensive processor with storage for the blades in the unit, which is one of the best inclusions in the machine, making it a good starting unit for the starting chef.
Breville Pizza Cooker
Price: $170
Pizza is one of the easiest food types a chef can make, and like the toasties, it can result in some crazy combinations that show how good a chef is with flavours and ingredients. But while dough is easy to make — flour, water, yeast, sugar, olive oil, and time — cooking the pizza can require a good oven with even heat.
Fortunately there are gadgets to assist, such as the Breville Crispy Crust, a pizza oven with a pizza stone, window, and even cooking to make that easy dish a real cinch.
DeLonghi Multifry Classic
Price: $349
If the cook you’re buying for isn’t too fancy with a pot or pan (they will be later, don’t you worry), a multi-cooker might be a good option, providing the ability to cook several things by simply hitting a few buttons.
DeLonghi isn’t the only player in this category, but it is one that takes the idea and throws in an air fryer, which is another way of saying “small fan-forced oven in a box.”
If that doesn’t mean much to you, consider it a great and easy way to bake cakes and cook chips.
Sharp Slow Juicer
Price: $499
Slow juicing is the new new craze, because while everyone wants to get fit and juicers have been around for yonks, we’re only now just realising how much fruit has been wasted in the blade-based juicers.
Sharp’s slow-juicer pulverises the fibre and separates it, sending the fibre to one jug and the juice to another, getting the juice out in a gadget that could sit right next to a blender when it’s not being used.
Nespresso Lattissima Pro
Price: $899
Coffee fanatics come in two varieties: those who like pod machines and those who don’t.
If you don’t mind the pod variety and are over the basic $99-499 machines, you’ll want to check out Nespresso’s Lattissima Pro, an encapsulated coffee machine that can make the texturise the milk for you and pour it directly into the cup with the coffee to make cappuccinos and latte macchiatos without any interference from you.
The milk container can also be taken out and stored in the fridge for cooling and safe keeping, and extra milk containers can be bought for other milk types, making it ideal for a home or business with several people who like several types of coffee.
Breville Oracle
Price: $2499
Those coffee fanatics we mentioned? The second variety are people who don’t like pod machines and prefer the art of making coffee, and the personality of the bean.
If you know someone for this category (or if it’s you), the machine is generally big, fiddly, and designed to get the best coffee, even if it requires a knowledge of another language to use properly.
Not Breville’s Oracle, which has been built with a triple heat boiling system to get espresso extracted within a degree of a specific temperature, to always deliver steam on demand, and to texture milk and extract the coffee at the same time, keeping the cup the same temperature throughout making it. There’s also a grinder built into the Oracle and an easy to read LCD system for those who like obvious read-outs.
