Best Tefal All-In-One Kitchen Appliances

Great Cooking Device for the Our Time-Poor World – These days everyone is talking about cooking food from scratch. This has been shown to have numerous health benefits. But of course, people are… Read more

time-poor. This machine is great as it can save time by automating numerous processes. It is an automatic cooking machine which heats, chops, whips etc. as well as cooking the food, similar to a Thermomix. I have not owned a Thermomix and I have owned a Kenwood kCook so I am comparing it to the kCook. This has some advantages over the kCook – the bowl is larger but the machine itself is more compact. The four automatic cooking settings make it simpler to use. The blades are easier to put in and change over, especially during the cooking process. The machine is really let down by the terrible cook-book. But more about that later.

Positives: It is really neat on the benchtop – even though the bowl is larger than the KCook.

Large Bowl Capacity – means you can batch cook to a certain extent.

Ease of changing blades – this is a great design addition – each blade/attachment has a little extended part with a little knob on the top so the blade can be taken out and swapped over during the cooking process.

Auto Settings – the soup setting is fantastic. It is so easy to use and produces wonderful soup! There are also settings for slow cooking, pastry and steaming.

Blade Box – a really like that this machine has a nice neat little box to put the accessories in. It is a major issue with this type of appliance – what do you do with all of the spare parts when you’re not using them?

Steaming Tray – this is a great addition and works well.

Negatives: Cookbook – this cookbook needs to be rewritten. There are SO many errors. Please see below as I have dedicated a section to this issue. Apart from that there is no index in alphabetical order so if you’re referring back to a recipe you’ve used before you have to go to a section and scan down until you find the recipe.

Lack of Aerating – this appliance doesn’t really aerate in the same way as a stand mixer. There is an additional tool which can be purchased for this purpose, but you won’t get nice lightly fluffy cupcakes for example.

The Lid - it is not obvious which is the front or the back. I consistently put it on backwards and have to turn it around. It is not obvious how the steam settings work on the lid insert (steam in and out) and the icons on the insert are so small I can’t really see which is which anyway.

Safety Lock – another issue with the lid - as a safety feature the lid needs to lock in place before it will start. I often need to shake the machine about a bit for the locking device to activate.

Dishwasher – most of it is dishwasher safe which is great. But there is a small part which has to be taken out of the bottom of the bowl so that it can be washed. I’m wondering how long it will take for this or the locking nut which attaches it under the bowl to go missing. This seems like a big mistake to me when these parts are made from plastic and metal. Also this part is hard to clean – when I made bread it got a lot of dough in between the parts. I then discovered why it comes with a dinky little brush thing – I used that to clean the muck out. Apparently there is a rubber seal that is also not dishwasher friendly though I have been putting it in the dishwasher as I can’t work out how to remove it.

Serving Number Options – there is a lack of information in the cookbook on how to change the number of serves of a meal and how far you can push this. I like to always cook a double batch and freeze one lot for later. So this all needs to be done by trial and error.

Things We’ve Tried Cooking So Far: With any new cooking device it can take some adjustments to get used to the new cooking style. The only thing we (my daughter and I) have perfected so far is the soup. I’m sure with more practice we will be able to get better results.

Soup – this is an absolute standout for me. Put everything in, push the button and it produces perfectly cooked lovely pureed soup. I’ve made pumpkin soup and mushroom soup. Consistently fantastic.

Muffins – my daughter tried the smarty muffin recipe in the cookbook. Alas she followed the recipe which omitted a raising agent. The worst muffins we’ve ever had. We need to try again to see if we can get a better result with a better recipe.

Panna Cotta – the panna cotta tasted lovely but it was strangely dense and thick. Worth trying again.

Bolognese – I cooked as I usually would. I struggled to brown the onions. Due to having a lid on (normally I’d cook in a frypan) it had way too much liquid, so it needed to be cooked a to longer. Turned out fine. Strangely there is no Bolognese recipe in the book. Ive found a recipe on the app so I’ll try that next time.

Bread – I followed the instructions. After it mixed the bread mix, it supposedly kneaded it. But the dough hadn’t come together so it still had an odd crumbly texture. I continued to follow the instructions as I wanted to do it according to the cookbook. It has an automatic proofing setting which is a great addition (one of the pastry settings). Because the dough hadn’t come together it didn’t proof properly. I took it out, kneaded it by hand a bit and put it all back in and went through the whole process again. It has a setting where is kneads and then proofs the dough with all of the timings set (these can be adjusted). The second time it did rise a bit but still didn’t look right. I put the dough in a tin and left it for a bit. I did end up rising. The bread turned out heavy. I think it did an adequate job of kneading the bread. I think this could work if you worked on it and refined the method.

Mashed Potato – the mashed potato turned out lovely. But it takes ages so long you’d need to put it on early in your meal prep. The recipe says the total time needed is 46 minutes. You have to steam the potatoes for 30 minutes, then take them out, empty out the water and dry to out, then put the potato and other ingredients in and there is a setting where it automatically mixes the potato. For me this takes way too much time compared to just boiling and mashing them in a pot. Maybe you’d use this if you didn’t have room on your stove?

Banana Bread – my daughter used a different recipe. The banana bread turned out lovely.

I’ve mainly relied on the cookbook and have recently discovered the app – which for me I think will greatly improve the useability of the machine. It includes both the recipe book recipes and user uploaded recipes. The app makes things much easier to find and you can just use the search function instead of trawling through the terribly designed index in the recipe book. Some of the editing mistakes in the book have been corrected in the app or in some cases where the recipe is ridiculously wrong they have deleted the recipe altogether.

Cookbook Issues: Does someone want to employ me to edit the cookbook? Seriously – this has so many mistakes it needs to be withdrawn from the market and edited.

Recipes are not really well adapted for Australia. For example, there is a red Kuri squash soup. How about butternut? As for fish, there are loads of recipes for ling, sea bass and cod. But how about popular Australian fish types such as barramundi, snapper, whiting etc? At the very least some suggestions for local common fish varieties are needed.

Why is there a section called “Main Courses – Tarts and Pizza”? This makes no sense in Australia as we rarely have tart as a main course. I just found a “pumpkin pie with pecan crust:” recipe in that section. It sounds like a lovely sweet tart which I would try if the recipe made ANY sense. Something has gone vastly wrong here – no pecan or pumpkin in the recipe. It contains capsicum, “mild???” onion and tomatoes.

On page 184 there is a tomato tart. It contains OO wheat flour or T45 flour. I know of OO flour from making pizza. But again – these are not common Australian ingredients. And what the heck is “powdered veal sauce”? (p.227). The book also has some outright mistakes which need to be fixed.

Custard tart recipe on p. 267 has no instructions about what to do with the shortcut pastry even though it is listed in the ingredients. Do you pre-bake the pastry? The picture shows a tart which was cooked in a tart tin not a high-sided tin. And it clearly has a pastry base. It also lists two “sachets” of vanilla sugar. How big is a sachet?

The Smartie Muffin recipe on p. 241 has no raising agent. My daughter followed the recipe and made very dense muffins. The recipe on the previous page has baking powder as an ingredient.

The Panna Cotta on p. 244 asks for double cream. This is not an Australian term. We used part thickened cream and part “Dollop” cream. It turned out very dense. Many recipes ask for “granulated” sugar. In Australia it is just white sugar.

On p. 196 there is a recipe for zucchini fritters with a picture of a bowl of soup.

The polenta on p. 198 has a photo of rectangles of something that has been shallow fried. But the recipe involved whizzing up some ingredients, cooking and serving. I need an “eye roll” emoji here at this point.

The Cookbook is not in alphabetical order! You have to go to “Desserts” (for example) and scan your eyes down until you find what you’re looking for. Fine if you’re browsing but impossible if you just want to go back to a recipe you’ve used before.

Things we still need to try – I haven’t sorted out the app yet. And I haven’t tried the slow cooking feature.

Conclusion: I think this is a great machine which is hugely let down by a cookbook which has been poorly edited and not adjusted for the Australian market. For those who love cooking everything from scratch this is a really good appliance. It looks neat on the bench top and it has multiple really good functions.