FlavorWave Oven, the next best thing to convenience and fast food.
Written: Jun 15 '02 (Updated Jun 15 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast and walk away cooking, double rack, fat free cooking, limitless possibilities
Cons: None that I found.
The Bottom Line: The Flavorwave oven is an excellent choice to replace your old oven for cooking your meals.
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| lavoisier's Full Review: Thane Flavorwave Oven |
One day when I was coming back into my dorm room and it was about 22:00; plus I was too tired to even watch the stove to cook something to eat. Since I'm not the Mac and Cheese kind of person, because I find Mac and Cheese kind of disgusting though; since I never liked the taste of it at all. Hope I didn't offend you though. So, I ended up buying takeouts or even going to fast food joints for meals and I find myself blowing precious hard earned money for sometimes not so tasty food. Recently when I tuned into a TV infomercial on a Sunday afternoon, it started offering the product. Now I have seen this infomercial several times now and I've kept thinking about ordering it, but I tend to put it off since I forgot about the order number and I didn't really want to order online, due to security risks if I gave them my credit card number. In addition, I've also looked at the Toastmaster Ultra Vection oven as an alternative choice, but I find that the capacity of that infrared oven too small to really feed my friends back at the dorm as well, so I've eventually chose the FlavorWave oven instead.
The Oven
The oven was shipped to my home, shortly after Christmas, kind of a late Christmas present from my family. The assembly was very minimal, with attaching the dome cover to the main infrared and convection unit and then I plug it in. It's that simple. The first thing I cooked in the oven we're boneless skinless chicken breasts, which I find it tough and dry when I cooked it in the frying pan. It takes just about the same time as it does if I did it on the frying pan, but the final product is so much different in the FlavorWave oven compared to the skillet method. With the FlavorWave oven, I've had very juicy and succulent cuts of meat. I've experienced the same results that I had with the chicken, with all the beef cuts, pork cuts, seafood; especially shrimp and even in the toughest cuts of meat like lamb shanks is no problem with the FlavorWave oven. The great thing besides how the food tastes when I cook them in the FlavorWave oven, is how remarkably fast it was. It had the speed of the microwave and I still get professional cooking results, like I would expect at a pricey restaurant. Even oregano shrimp tasted more like an appetizer than just a bland shrimp meal. You get meals faster than the speed of a microwave, but without any sacrifices of taste and texture.
The incredible thing about the oven is that it doesn't just use one method of cooking like in a conventional oven. With conventional ovens, it tends to cook the food in layers. Supposedly you try to cook a frozen steak, by the time when the surface of the steak is charred and burnt, your center of the meat is probably still stone cold raw. Other than just the convection method as you¡¦ve seen in the convection ovens, the FlavorWave oven also features conduction like your stovetop range and infrared that you may see in the kitchens in the restaurant trade. The advantage of the conduction is to give the food item its crustiness and it browns it to perfection. The convection heat cooks the food article into its internal layers. Plus, with the penetrating infrared that provides flavor as it acts as an osmosis processor, cooking to enhance the tenderness of the food article without using fats or extremely wet marinades or those chemical tenderizers. Because the food doesn't sit in its own fat or waters, it doesn't sog up your food nor it does leave it greasy. The fats and frost water go into the base unit and the fats and frost are also disposable too. These fats tend to be hydrogenated, which can clog up your arteries and lead to stroke, the leading cause of death or becoming a pacemaker recipient.
With the dual height cooking rack (reversible), I can use the FlavorWave oven for different sizes of food articles. Say if I were to cook just a veal chop on the oven, I would use the higher rack for the veal chop, as the oven lid can close properly with the high rack due to the height of the veal chop. But if I were to cook something larger on the oven, like a full sized 14 lb. holiday turkey; I would use the lower rack, because the turkey requires more space in the oven than just the chicken or Cornish game hen.
But possibilities are not limited to just the main course or savory food items, because with the infrared cooking technology, you can actually heat or bake your apple pie, brownies or even cinnamon twists and they produce the same professional results just like my grandma's apple pie.
Say if you want to steam like veggies, I would put some water or chicken broth on the base unit and using conduction it creates some steam for me and you don't have to boil your veggies to death, like many people tend to do.
With the warming feature on the main control unit, it allows me to keep my foods warm for up to 9 hours, so if I come home late from classes and the rest of my friends had dinner before me, I can ensure that my food is still warm, yet it tastes just as fresh as it came out of the oven.
To adjust the cooking time, you just type in the time on the digital keypad and activate the cooking. But you do want to follow what the recipe booklet says for the particular food article though. With this feature, I can just walk away and forget about it. What does this mean? This means, if I have some work to do or I feel like taking a shower, I don't have to be near the unit and watch the food at all, as it never overcooks if you follow the instructions accordingly. Plus the best thing about it is that I don't even have to preheat the unit, unlike the oven which requires preheating for faster results.
After using the unit, clean up is a breeze. What I mean, is that the pan has a non-stick surface that also allows me to warm my food items like cinnamon buns or hash browns and you don't even need oil to prevent it from sticking at all. Just take soapy water and use the soft side of the sponge and you're done. The same thing goes with the grill rack too. The GE Lexan dome can even be removed from the lid cap for easy cleaning too, because those crevices can be very greasy. Plus, the GE Lexan dome and the grill rack are all upper rack dishwasher safe too.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I find that the FlavorWave oven really allows me to save time and energy, as it doesn't really heat up the whole kitchen like your oven does and it cooks much faster than your oven or even the microwave. Without it, I may even still be ending up with order in pizzas or go across the street for a Whopper and fries, which can be very unhealthy and non-practical, because they really cost me a bite of my paycheck that I have with my part time job. For about $200, it really makes it a worthy investment for the home as well as for the dorm rooms too and it really delivers the same results as the GE Advantium oven at $1500 and the Toastmaster¡¦s Ultra Vection, which has a rather small capacity.
Bundle
The Flavorwave oven
Recipe guide
Manual
Video Tape.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
lavoisier
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Member: Hugh Jazz
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Reviews written: 180
Trusted by: 26 members
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