Halogen Oven's A New Way to Cook - A Review

My sister has long extolled the virtues of her Halogen Oven and I had been considering splashing out on one when I was asked by Clifford James if I would like to review one. Seeing as I had already been considering getting one I said yes and eagerly awaited it's arrival. When it did come I was surprised at the size of the thing, but after a quick phone call to my sister where we both measured our Halogen Oven's I discovered that they are the same size.

I was really eager to start cooking in the Halogen oven and so as soon as it was out of the packaging (and had a quick wash) I quickly put together a cheese sandwich to be toasted in the Halogen Oven. I made a video of it cooking (yes I was that sad) and it has to be said I was really disappointed with my cheese sandwich, which was brown and crispy toast (I like it like that) on top, but not on the bottom. Over the next week I cooked everything in the Halogen Oven that I could think of. My sister let me borrow one of her Halogen Oven cook books and I was looking at recipes for things that I would never of thought possible in the Oven, such as a boiled egg! Here is a little montage of photos of the things that I cooked!

Generally everything came out well, (I will need to play around a little until my Muffins are golden on the outside and cooked on this inside) but I was a little worried about there being "hot spots" in the Halogen Oven because some areas of food would brown up more quickly than others. My sister being the clever sod that she is suggested just turning the bowl slightly every so often during the cooking phase in order to not have the hot spots focused on one place. As I said she is a clever sod, but then she has also been solely cooking all her families meals in her Halogen Oven for the last two years. Well the Halogen Oven, the Microwave and a vegetable steamer.

The one thing that I was really eager to cook in the Halogen Oven was a Roast Chicken and on the Sunday after the Halogen Oven arrived I got my chance. I prepared the chicken by rubbing butter on it and seasoning the skin (I don't care if it is unhealthy to eat, it still tastes nice in small quantities!) and then placed it into the Halogen Oven and left it. As you can see when it was done it looked fantastic and was a very moist chicken. Top Ender and Baby Boy loved the meat and had been very keen to watch the chicken as it cooked. Daddy and I were very impressed with the Chicken as we couldn't believe that the Chicken (which had been relatively cheap) tasted as lovely as it had, especially when the week before we had brought a rather expensive Chicken which in comparison had tasted a bit well, flat.

There is a rather nifty little function of being able to put the Halogen Oven on to a wash mode. When you have finished cooking and you have removed your food, you can add to the bottom of the oven some warm water and a bit of washing up liquid. This is then heated and swirled around the oven and it does clean up a lot of the mess, but I did find that I needed to give it an extra scrub when I had been cooking greasy food.

I had to ask Daddy how the Halogen Oven works and he explained that the halogen heating elements convert the electricity into a very hot heat. There is a fan in the Halogen Oven lid which circulates the air. This is best seen when it is in the wash mode in the video above. Whilst there are some claims that the Halogen Oven will cook a chicken in thirty minutes I haven't found this, most of the times that I cooked for in the Halogen Oven were only a few minutes shorter than in a conventional oven.

I haven't worked out the exact costings for the energy used in cooking the foods, but with the help of Daddy we worked out that the Halogen Oven costs around 28p per hour to run and our particular gas oven (at gas mark 4) costs around 24p per hour. The thing to remember here is that cooking a chicken in the Halogen oven takes approximately half the time than in a gas oven (at gas mark 4). As a lot of recipes seem to suggest that cooking times in the Halogen Oven are very much reduced compared to "normal" cooking times, the savings could be quite substantial over a year.

There were only two downsides that I found to the Halogen Oven. The first is it's size. Now I have a large kitchen, certainly big enough for someone like me who likes to keep some appliances out, but the Halogen does take up a lot of counter space. For someone with a small kitchen this 10L capacity one might just be too big. The second downside was the timer. It was hit and miss with the timer and I did burn the Muffins because they were in for too long as it didn't turn off when it should of. I found that when I was setting the timer I had to give the dial a little push back to the left in order to get it to start ticking and I didn't always remember that. Other than that? I really really really love my Halogen Oven.

The Clifford James Halogen Oven that I reviewed costs £46.98, as I was given a lid stand too. There are a lot of accessories that you can buy to go with the Halogen Oven and from my sisters expert advice I would recommend buying them all!