2011 Appliances No Kitchen Should Be Without

This post was a bit of a challenge, trying to find the products that no kitchen should be without.  There are a lot of wonderful appliances out there and to narrow it down to a manageable number, in this case five, required considerable effort.  When I started with the concept, it seemed simple enough, but as I began to write down categories and products, I began to appreciate the magnitude of the labor I had assigned myself.  With that in mind I have tried to list out only items that anyone, no matter what stage of life they are in, could use and it would improve the quality of life. Whether this was achieved by providing a better dining or drinking experience, saving time, or saving considerable effort were considered equally important; as was trying to make sure that they all applied equally to a healthy lifestyle or the tastes of a hardened state fair food junkie…after all one of my credos is eat and drink whatever it is that delights you.

As far as format goes, I will introduce the category of product, explain my rationale for including it in this list, mention a few honorable mentions, and close each category with my personal recommendation as far as brand and model, and why.  I haven’t listed the categories in order of importance, as at any given moment one category will eclipse another on this list.  It is left to you, me reader, as to which order you would place them in.

Induction Cooktop –

Anyone who has one of these will know why I have included it, and now for those of you who don’t, let me explain what it is and how it works.  An induction cooktop to all appearances looks like a normal smooth top electric cooktop with no knobs…but it is soooo much more.  The induction process works by means of having an induction engine under the ceramic glass top, instead of a traditional radiant, ribbon or coil element.  These three traditional electric cooking methods work by generating heat in the element, transferring the heat to the ceramic glass top, and then transferring the heat from that surface into the pan.  The induction engine uses magnetic energy to excite the molecules of the pan, thereby heating the pan directly without having to heat up the cooktop in between.  The result…on induction I can boil water in half the time I can on electric, and in less than half the time of gas.  Yes, you read that right…half the time.  How many more things would you cook if you could get the heat you wanted in half the time?  The other wonderful thing about induction is low heats…first, when I want to drop from high on a boil to low heat, it’s a mater of a handful of seconds—a single handful.  Also traditionally electric cooktops have been tough to do simmers on because of how they heat; on a normal electric cooktop if I have it set to #2, one would assume it is around twenty percent heat, but electrics don’t work that way…number two usually means full heat, but only on 20% of the time, which spells disaster for whatever you just scorched.  The induction is regulated and constant, if you have it set to a low heat, it is a constant low heat…always.  It is fully capable of keeping a pan of chocolate on it and maintaining a liquid form for hours without scorching.  You get the best of all possible cooking methods, the quick heat of electric, the gentle simmer of gas, and cleanability you wouldn’t believe.  Let me explain that…normally a smoothtop electric can be hard to clean because if you get a spill and it cooks on to the surface, it is very difficult to get off.  In the case of induction, however, the pan gets hot, not the burner;so if you get a spill, it won’t bake on to the surface.  That also brings up the safety feature…the burners don’t get hot.  The only heat in the burner is residual heat coming back off the pan.  While it can get uncomfortably hot if you are cooking something on high heat for a long period of time, it will never get hot enough to burn you simply from touching it.  You can never set a kitchen towel or potholder on fire from forgetting it was on the cooktop when you turned it on.  The only requirement for using this method of cooking, the pans have to be constructed of magnetic metal, they don’t have to be designed only for induction cooking, a magnet simply needs to be able to stick to the pan to make sure it will work.  In the event that you have a aluminum or copper bottom pan you are not willing to stop using, there is something called an induction interface, which is a steel disc listed at the bottom of this blog, that will allow you to use any pan on the cooktop.

While virtually every manufacturer of cooking appliances makes an induction cooktop, and most of them very nicely featured, the one I would personally select would be the GE Profile PHP960DMBB.  It has a great layout in terms of burner size and wattage, with an 11” main 3700 watt burner in the center, 19 power level settings, a pan detect function which shuts off the burner if the pan is removed, and even a control lock to prevent a child or cat from accidentally turning on the cooktop.  Why GE?  Over my 18 years of selling appliances I have sold over 62 different brands and they (GE) are the most reasonable in terms of taking are of a product or customer issue, even if it is something they could use their verbiage to wiggle out of.  That means something to me.  In the event of a tie, a win always goes to GE.  Having said that, the biggest factor in my decision is they took a stand to make induction affordable to the main appliance market…when the least expensive induction cooktops out there were $2,500 and more GE introduced price points under $1,500, which frankly in my estimation was a deal they were losing money on.  They looked at it as in investment in the new technology, and felt that by lowering the price point to that level they would spike business enough to create the volume in sales to make it attainable.  In response, most other major appliance manufacturers followed suit and recently made significant price reductions.  In my estimation they have done more to bring this technology to the mass market than anyone else, and they deserve some recognition for that.

Steam Oven –

Steam ovens have been out for many years, so why do I pick 2011 to make it an essential appliance?  Someone made the market much more interesting.  Traditionally steam ovens have either used reservoirs or direct plumbed water lines into the unit in order to do cooking in a steam oven, cooked with steam and nothing else.  Even in that form they are wonderful products on many levels.  My tastes run more in the direction of flavorful than healthy, so initially I was very much skittish about this category until I went through a factory training with the folks at Miele up in Princeton, New Jersey.  We did all the normal things one can think of for a steam oven and then a few more, and I learned quite a bit that day.  Vegetables didn’t have to be bland.  Wow, what a concept.  A little seasoning, simply salt, pepper, dill and many more every day spices turned vegetables into a flavorful dish rather than the rabbit food I had always considered most vegetables to be.  We did shrimp scampi in about 3 minutes.  We cooked chicken breasts and steaks…which at that point had to be either browned in a conventional oven or covered in a sauce of some sort, because steamed meat by nature does not look appetizing, even though it is cooked superbly.

Needless to say Miele converted me to a steam oven aficionado.  I give them a lot of credit for that.  Having said that the manufacturers in that category at that time were really primarily Miele and Gaggenau, both of which are companies whose prices go a long way toward showing the amount of pride they take in their products.  It was a great product and for those who had the means and space for a third oven I sold quite a few.  Because of the price and the fact that while you could fit a surprising amount in the compact oven chassis; it would never be available to the mass market in the form that it was in.

Recently someone took some of the best features of the steam oven and incorporated it into fully functional full sized convection ovens.  These ovens are plumbed with a water line so they can use steam, and they are also KitchenAid’s top of the line oven Chassis with a wonderful dual fan and heating element convection system.  Now someone can take advantage of all the wonderful benefits of steam and still have some really great full size ovens all in the same appliance.  You can create breads with chewy crusts, you can do vegetables, seafood, and roasts, chickens and turkeys with great browning and incredibly moisture retained in the meat.  Did I mention you can do a 15 lb turkey in about 90 minutes in this unit?   They took two very good appliances and came out with an amazing one, the KitchenAid KEBU208SSS.

Speedcook Oven –

At one point, in the seventies this was a term applied to a microwave oven, but now it has come to be so much more.  The hard thing about using a microwave for actually cooking in, rather than reheating leftovers or prepackaged foods designed to be prepared with a microwave, is that you suffer a definitive change, and not for the better, in the texture and or chewiness of the food.  They are good for rapid defrost, popcorn and leftovers, but leave a lot to be desired if you actually want to produce a food that would usually be baked, grilled or fried.  It wasn’t until 1976 that someone found a way to harness a microwave and actually produce oven quality results in reduced time.  Thermador came out with a very low wattage microwave built around an oven chamber that combined thermal cooking and microwave technology, with a result that cooked 35% faster than the oven alone.

I, for one, am elated that Thermador developed this category, which was the precursor to modern speedcook technology.  Without Thermador pioneering the process, I don’t think the category would exist.  As is often the case, however, it is not the person or organization which created the technology that saw it to its fruition, and in this case virtually anyone in the industry would tell you that the end all get all in speedcook is GE’s Advantium.  The remarkable thing about my determination here is that when it came out, right around the turn of the millennium, and we had it on display at the showroom I worked in, I hated it.  Why?  The first generation had too intense of heat on the bottom and it flash fried the moisture out of anything less dense than a potato or steak—the thing that made it immediately apparent was the endless supply of cookie dough GE sent out to dealers to use in demos.  You’d cook the cookies and before they hit the counter they may as well have been petrified.

Ten years later I say you can’t do without it.  The current version has two high intensity halogen lights on the top, a convection cooking system, a ceramic electric lower (bake) element, and the normal microwave all in one nice little bundle.  Now I can’t find a food that it won’t do a wonderful job on, and I’ve tried hard.  They offer varieties in 120V and 240V, and as built in ovens or as over the range microwave hoods.  The difference in the power is all about the time.  The 240V versions are capable of cooking many foods in 1/8 the time of a normal oven, and the 120V as you might expect, ¼ of the time.  The results are oven quality results, just much faster.  Preheat time is a thing of the past.  Stressing over how to cook is a thing of the past with their built in “Oh so easy to use” menu system.  Most importantly not having a great meal because it takes too long to cook is just not the case.  I love food.  I love to eat.  I enjoy cooking.  But let’s face it, if I get home at 7 and can make and cook Lasagna, or a roast with baked potatoes in an hour, Ron is a happy man.  It’s that easy.

The models I'll select here, because they offer so many ,will be the GE Monogram ZSC2201NSS for the built in 240V badboy--arguably the best appliance on the market, and the GE Monogram ZSA1201RSS 120V over-the-range version, since it is more likely to work in a retrofit than the 240V over-the range unit would.  The reason I selected the Monogram over the Profile, the styling works not just with GE products, but with anyone's products, and regardless of who made the rest of your appliances, this is something you NEED to have in your kitchen.

Great results.  Great time savings.  Great job GE!!!

Warming Drawer (Slow Roast Warming Drawer)

If you read that like Bond, James Bond, then you got it right.  Warming drawers used to just be for grandma, but now you can get them in about 1/4 of all the ranges on the market, or as a built in appliance.  Any way you try it, they are a nice feature.  You may ask why, because you can heat most foods in a microwave.  The answer…some things warm up better in an oven like environment, pizza for instance, gets warm and melty without getting soggy. Nachos come out wonderful, relatively quick and not so hot that you burn so deep into the palate that they scorch the brain.  Dinner stays warm, bacteria free and maintains its original quality and texture when left in a warming drawer.  Breads do wonderfully in them.  Since they give you oven quality results without the extended preheat times because they are smaller than the oven cavity, and don’t put off as much heat back into the kitchen, they should be a mainstay of anyone’s summer cooking.

Ok, that all sounds nice.  What’s a slow roast warming drawer?  Most warming drawers go from 140 degrees to about 210, although there are a couple manufacturers that go down to 90 degrees.  The slow roast warming drawers are put out be KitchenAid (KEWS105SSS)and Jenn Air (JWD2030W)and will actually go up to 250 degrees, so not only can you do many warming functions, and the creation of nature’s perfect food—nachos; you can now roast meats in them at low heats for hours for succulent, tender results that conventional microwaves can’t really pull off.

Create some wonderful easy dishes, keep meals warm, reheat leftovers to their original state, and now operating like a crock pot, without taking the counter space and still allowing you to use a decent sized pan.

Beverage Centers

Some of you may be thinking, ok, I got some of the other things, but isn’t this a little over the top?  If you saw how many of these units I sold, you wouldn’t think so.  You’re still wondering why you can’t do without this one, though, I can feel it.

First and foremost, it keeps kids and company both out of the main refrigerator.  Kids are still going to go after food, but if you can keep their liquids in a small undercounter beverage refrigerator, you’ll cut their trips into the main refrigerator in half or less.  That is great, because the thing that is most harmful to the food in your refrigerator is opening it.  Every time you open your refrigerator cool are goes out and warm humid air comes in.  This makes the compressor kick on to cool the inside back off, which in most cases means it creates the cold air in the freezer and pushes it through into the refrigerator compartment.  Do this enough it cuts the life of your food in half in the fresh food side, and gives you freezer burn in the freezer side.

Frankly when I have people over I don’t want them seeing what I had yesterday that is left over in the refrigerator, or if my son spilled something and didn’t clean it up.  With a beverage refrigerator everyone knows they are able to help themselves and it isn’t awkward for anybody.  Why stress when friends show up unexpectedly?  The beverage center is always clean because it is only for drinks.  Although keep in mind it doesn’t get down to a 33 or 34 degree setting like a normal refrigerator, so if you are waiting for the mountains on your can or bottle to turn blue…it just might not happen.

I would say equally important, but many would say more importantly, by putting all your beverages in the beverage center it allows you to fit a lot more food in your refrigerator—and I can certainly see the advantage in that.  That is one of the biggest complaints you here in the appliance business, “My refrigerator won’t hold enough.”  I sold someone a refrigerator with the capacity of a tanker truck, and two years later they are back in wanting something with the capacity of an ocean liner.  It doesn’t matter how big the refrigerator is, it ends up getting filled up and cluttered and people feel they need more space. The beverage center gives you much more use out of your existing refrigerator, without having to but a newer, larger unit.

This category is a harder one to give you a single model recommendation on, since Monogram, GE Profile, Kitchenaid, Jenn Air, Thermador and many other manufacturers have perfectly fine units, if forced to choose, I would say the ZDBT240PBS from Monogram since it has privacy glass on it, in the even that your pastor stops by and you don’t want him to notice you have ten bottles of wine, a case of corona, two bottles of tequila, and enough margarita mix to choke a horse—but that’s just me.  If you don’t drink wine, the choice is easier, I would get KitchenAid’s KURG24RWRS, which is actually an undercounter refrigerator with a glass door—it still looks like a beverage center, but isn’t every day better when the mountain’s turn blue?