It’s easier than ever to get in the kitchen, and with a home appliance here and there, anyone with a passing interest in making something delicious can help bring out their true calling.
Sunbeam Big Fill Toastie
Price: $70
So making a jaffle isn’t technically cooking, but you can always prove the haters wrong by making the ultimate cooked sandwich, bringing in all sorts of expensive fix-in’s and proteins as required.
Hey, you can even bring in some expensive bread, or to be really spesh, maybe some bread you’ve made yourself. Now wouldn’t that be something.
Sodastream Play
Price: $99
Being a chef doesn’t necessarily mean you have to make dinners or desserts, because there’s always the idea of making drinks.
In fact, making drinks can be done by making your own soda, something you can do by taking your favourite fruit or flavour, adding sugar, boiling, and essentially producing your own cordial. Once it has been boiled down into a syrup, you can add this to mineral water.
Instant drink chef, just like that.
…and just in case you feel like injecting bubbles into things you may not normally inject bubbles into — you know, like something a little alcoholic — you might want to watch a video we filmed showing you what works… and what doesn’t.
Watch our video to find out what works…
Tefal Snack Collection
Price: $100 with $25 for each additional plate
Toastie makers are pretty awesome, but when they do a little more than a sandwich, you get our attention. Tefal’s “Snack Collection” takes a toastie maker like the sort above but offers replaceable plates, so you’re not just stuck with a jaffle iron.
In fact, you’ll get a few choices here, with waffles, pancakes, doughnuts, Dutch baby pancakes, panini, french toast, and so on.
Ok, so technically everything here is basically fried and dessert like in some way or another, but if it means we can save a pan and not have to buy a dedicated waffle iron, we’re interested, and someone else might be, too.
Panasonic ZE105WST Rice Cooker
Price: $149
If there’s a chef you know that tends to rely on rice for the main carb used in cooking, a rice cooker is probably a desirable item, and Panasonic’s latest contribution to this area should be one of interest.
The new white box relies on a combination of a special diamond coating to conduct heat quickly and fuzzy logic to work out how much rice and how much water is found on the inside, with the appliance using this information to churn out perfect rice for almost every variety, outside of arborio.
Russell Hobbs Five Minute Pizza and Snack Oven
Price: $199
The pizza oven hasn’t changed much over the past years, and typically resembles a circular oven that heats from both sides, but a new model from Russell Hobbs will try to change this.
This time, the idea is to build a small oven but bring in a quartz element for heating, which gets hot super fast. In fact, the time it takes to get hot relates back to its name, because if you’ve made a pizza or want something grilled, it won’t take much longer than five minutes or so.
Sunbeam Duos Electronic Sous Vide
Price: $199
Let’s say you want to cook a decent meal, but you’re not sure you’ll get the temperature right to make the protein respond the way you want to.
No worries, because the French technique of “sous vide” can be had in your kitchen at home.
The idea of this one stems from cooking food in a vacuum sealed water bath, with the temperature and time allowing the food to cook to where you want it to be. Think of this as levels of “done-ness”, because once it’s done, you can take the food out and store it until you actually plan to eat it (though probably not for longer than two days, unless you plan to freeze it).
Oh, and just in case you don’t sous vide all that often, the Sunbeam also doubles up as a slow cooker. That’s one more separate gadget you just don’t need anymore.
Breville Smart Scoop
Price: $399
One of our favourite little gadgets isn’t quite so little, and much like how we said you don’t need to be an actual food chef to be a proper chef, the Smart Scoop allows you to flex your dessert making muscle to come up with ice creams, gelato, and sorbet, devising frozen desserts of all sorts.
In comparison to the ice cream makers below the $200 mark, this one offers a compressor, while the less expensive models make you freeze a bowl that can only be used once every 18 hours or so. But with a compressor on board, you can make litre after litre of ice cream, cleaning the metal bucket out and reusing it.
Why, we ended up making four litres in under four hours. That was a fine day for ice cream, we’ll tell you that.
