25 February 2011

I'm asking again, Gorenje please come to North America


The Slovenian appliance manufacturer Gorenje has been on my radar for around the last two years. They make exceptionally well-designed and well-priced appliances and they're only sold on the other side of the Atlantic. When Blanco had me in Germany last month to attend The Living Kitchen and IMM it was painful to see the number of innovative, new things that never make it to the US and Canada.

So on my first day at the show I was walking the floor and I turned a corner and saw this.


At long last. I'd been reading about this company's products for ages and finally, I'd get to see them for myself.

I was beyond impressed with all of their offerings but what really got me was a wall oven they're calling the iChef+. It is a wall oven that looks as if it has an iPad embedded in it.


the iChef+ takes the idea of programming the setting on an oven to a level I never thought was possible. It has to temperature or timer controls. Rather, it has a hi-def touch pad that walks you through anything you want to bake with a simplicity that masks the complex programming you're actually doing with noteworthy perfection.

The home screen looks like this.


From here you pick any of the oven's five modes. So if I just want to bake something conventionally, then I'd just pick SIMPLEbake. By selecting that, I get a menu that looks like this.


There are nine options that pop up and you just scroll through them to find the kind of food you want to bake. The oven then works conventionally.


If you choose the AUTObake mode, the oven takes over a bit more. Select the kind of food you're baking and the oven tells you which kind of baking pan to use. You tell it the size of the portion you're baking how well done you want your food and what time you'd like to serve dinner. The oven then sets the temperature and time by itself. No guess work involved. So if you want to make prime rib but don't know how, the oven does so just get out of the way and let it.

PRObake allows you to program up to three temperature changes over the course of baking or roasting something. That's revolutionary, frankly. I cook a lot and a lot of foods require temperature changes while they're in the oven. Setting and resetting the timer and temperature is a pain in the butt and I'd kill for a way to program all of that in advance.

Not only that, once you set your cooking program in the PRObake mode you can save your recipe to MYbake.


This means you only have to program these settings once. So the prime rib temperature combo you've perfected can be saved as My Prime Rib in the MYbake library and the next time you make it, all you need to do is click on the title of your recipe. Slick!

Finally, the EXTRA mode holds all of this oven's additional features.


Note that it has a defrost mode and this is a convection oven, not a microwave. I'm as impressed as I remember it as I was when I was playing around with the controls.

Gorenje has a video that goes through the features of the iChef+ and what it communicates better than anything is how easy this oven is to use.




So after seeing that, maybe you can join my petition drive to get Gorenje to cross the pond. Please.

6 comments:

  1. I have a gorenje fridge. Retro looking - like smeg but these fridges actually work! I'm very fond of it. However I'm in the UK I'm afraid...

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  2. I know the exact line of fridges you're talking about and they do look very SMEG-like. I envy you your fridge. You have access to all the cool stuff over there Melissa. Someday the US will catch up but based on the looks of things over here, it'll be a while.

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  3. ah but we pay twice as much for it as you do, paul

    swings and roundabouts...!

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  4. Good point but cheap crap is still crap. :)

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