****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
My wife absolutely hates those thin membrane keyboards. This device has touch keys where you just tap on the glass. No frustration. We bought the large fryer. First thing we made was broccoli, I liked it, she thought it was a bit dry. Then we toasted English muffins and bread. You can lay 4 slices of bread on the bottom of the basket, albeit touching. They still toast nicely.Finally we made a boneless leg of lamb according to the recipe on serious eats. The hardest part was finding anchovies. This required that it hold a low cooking temperature. The longest it will run a roast cycle for is one hour. I set the temperature for 200F, time for one hour. An instant read thermometer had barely budged. Back in for another hour. Thermometer is moving now, but we want it medium rare. Reduce temp to 190F, time to 30 minutes. Done! The magic of convection cooking! Recipe suggested that I could expect another hour at 275F.The roast is removed to rest for 30 minutes while I roast vegetables in the lamb drippings at about 350F. (We used one of those liners, and removed it at this point, put in a new one.) Finally, the oven is heated to 400 (high as it will go) and the roast is seared for 10 minutes.Brilliant! The vast majority of the roast was cooked the way we wanted it, and the shallot-garlic-rosemary-anchovy (yes, you don't taste the anchovies, it just adds an umami hit) paste that went on the inside was an absolutely wonderful accent. The roast was cooked evenly in at least an hour less than the recipe said to plan for.Now as to the only odd thing about this is, again, the controls. The buttons change the mode, while the knob changes stuff within the mode. So when you first start it, the knob sets mode. Roast (cute little roast icon that looks like a paramecium) then hit temp, and it always starts at the same temperature. Spin it down to 200. Now hit time. It always starts at 10 minutes. Spin it for a long time to get it to an hour, finally hit start.At this point the device automatically preheats and does not deduct time until preheat is over.If you don't get that a paramecium means roast, there is a pictograph-to-English translation on a decal on the unit top.I want to take a minute to talk about the cookbook that comes with the unit. On first glance it looks slick, expensive, and well produced. When you actually read it, critical steps are missing from the recipes, all temperatures are in Celsius. The book seems to be a machine translation from some other language, but with all the hard parts removed. It skips from grams of this to tablespoons of that with no rhyme nor reason. Except for its value as a joke book it is useless. And the good news is that the cookbook is the only downside of the unit.
