When the cooking cycle is finished the oven emits a long beep. I just had to flick it up, which I found much easier and safer. This is the only model where you don't have to remove the lid to open. The flip-top lid made the Flavorwave Platinum halogen oven easy to use 'High', for example, helps the food cook even faster and improves browning. There's a digital display panel to set cooking time a panel which lights up as you select the temperature and a touch panel to set fan speed. And the control panel, built into the lid, is as complex as anything you'd expect on a lunar rocket. This all-singing, all-dancing model is like a mini-spaceship. Cooks well, great value but let down by having no stand. I heated up the pudding in only five minutes, and there was no whiff of chicken despite using the same bowl. The chicken was succulent - and took only 45 minutes to roast. With halogen ovens, it's the lid that plugs into the wall, so you can't take it far from the cooker.Īs this model doesn't come with a stand, I ended up holding the lid in one hand while trying to check the chicken with the other. It's too heavy to lift easily and got so hot I was terrified of putting it down on the work surface. It's inexpensive and would be superb value apart from one important detail. The Andrew James model cooks well and is good value The bowl - 33cm wide, taking a maximum of 12 litres - is light enough to carry to the table if you want to serve direct from the pot and the base is reassuringly solid. This oven is brilliantly easy to work and instructions are clear, although there's nothing fancy about it - it emits a tinny ping when cooking is complete and the light instantly switches off. I simply poured the chicken juices away before popping my pudding inside the bowl. I also wanted to check whether it's possible to cook two very different dishes without washing the oven in between. The pudding would have needed 22 minutes at the same temperature in a conventional oven. The potatoes, which you put in raw, would need 50 minutes. But my trusty halogen oven cookbook - My Halogen Heaven by Maryanne Madden - suggested one of the new machines could do it in just 33 minutes at 400f. In a conventional oven, my 1.5kg chicken would have taken around 90 minutes at 375f (190 c). In each oven, I cooked a roast chicken, roast potatoes and carrots, followed by a ready-made sticky toffee pudding. Some of the ovens also come with shelves so you can roast a larger chicken on the bottom while your vegetables or potatoes could go on the layer above - and because the fan circulates hot air evenly around the oven, there's no need to swap the chicken and vegetables around, or turn your food during cooking as in a conventional oven.īut is this latest kitchen gadget just a gimmick, or will halogen ovens really push traditional cookers onto the scrapheap?
This means you can watch your food cooking, and adjust cooking times according to how the food looks.īut while they're compact, they can fit a suprising amount of food in - I could easily fit a medium chicken surrounded by vegetables in the bowl. They consist of a clear glass bowl with a lid on top that contains the halogen bulbs and the high-powered fan. The ovens themselves are much smaller than their conventional rivals - and about an eighth of the cost. They also rely on infrared waves and an inbuilt high-performance fan, which helps circulate the intense halogen heat to cook the food as quickly as possible. The table-top oven was developed using halogen heating elements, which convert electrical energy into intense heat. Hot stuff: Tessa Cunningham tests the FlavorWave Plantinum halogen oven
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