Majjie's Blog

I've been to Bunny Appliance Warehouse today - to see a cooking demonstration by Britannia. Your intrepid reporter working on a Saturday you see? What do you mean? I went to sample the food? That was naturally a part of the process - I was forced to sample the (delicious) food myself, of course, in order to judge the cooking performance.

Here's Carol Potter, a home economist with Britannia, carving up a chicken she'd just cooked, on the rotisserie, in the range cooker she was using. It was certainly some of the tenderest chicken I have ever tasted. The pieces of breast meat were cooked perfectly; no dryness at all.

So which of Britannia's range cookers was she using - you might ask. It was this one ... the Dynasty XG -110cm:

I like the XG models - they're the ones with a separate grill. I don't like having the grill in with an oven but (as I've said before) that's probably because I'm not a very enthusiastic cleaner of ovens. The main multi-function oven comes with a "Quickstart" function which, according to Carol, means that it will heat up in a very fast 6 minutes (great for when you've just got in from work), whilst the rotisserie is in the smaller oven. The price tag you can see there says £4,299, in case you were wondering (although if you can get there in the next 15 minutes - you might get a better deal!).

Another gadget that impressed me, apart from the rotisserie, was the Chef Top. That's the bit with the food on it, in the picture above. Carol was cooking sliced courgettes and mushrooms - a great mound of them - with a touch of garlic. I tell you the smells in there were heavenly; although, if you were using a Chef Top in your own home, rather than in a big warehouse like that, it would be advisable to have an efficient cooker hood above it.

The Chef Top is a steel hotplate that fits over the centre fish burner of the Britannia hob ... and it's brilliant. You can cook bacon, steaks, stir fries, teppan yaki style meals - all sorts of things. It's slightly angled so that any excess fat runs off into a trough at the front - and it has a ventilation grille at the back for the gas burner below. I never could see anyone using a fish burner very frequently - but with a Chef Top, I reckon you'd be using it all the time.

Here's Carol using the Chef Top, whilst making some tomato tartlets and discussing the relative merits of gas and induction hobs (I'll come back to that another day) with one of Bunny's customers ... a truly multi-tasking lady.

I often recommend appliances from Appliance City - a web site run by Bunny Appliance Warehouse - in Majjie's shop. The staff there are very friendly and helpful - and will give you advice on what appliances to buy - not just try to sell you stuff. They've now gone up even further in my estimation, following today's visit. Did I mention how good the chocolate brownies were ...