Pretty good, but not quite great
4/5
The oven heats up quite quickly, and bakes my sourdough bread beautifully with the steam function. The hob is easy to adjust because of the knobs, and heats up pans quickly. The supplied roller-shelf is really useful for things like pizza, making it easyto inspect and arrange food easily on the baking stone. The door glass lifts out easily for cleaning. But there are niggles. When I turn the main oven to max (275C) (on turbo setting) it does easily get there, but then the element and the light switches offfor 10-15 minutes before coming back on again at about 250C or so. (It''s some sort of overheat protection.) This is annoying, because you can no longer see your pizza (the lightis off) and it takes longer to cook than it should. The manual has nothing to say about this, or what temperature is a reasonable maximum to use for long enough to make a few pizzas.The oven does take a long time to cool itself down after baking (always about an hour) and I wonder if there''s a design problem here and the cooling fan is not properly doing its job?The steam oven sends steam through the vents at the back of the hob -- this is normal, though they didn''t bother to tell you in the manual. This would be fine, but it condenses on my wall and runs down the back, presumably forming a puddle underneath. No one on their help line could tell me how to prevent this, so I wedge a j-cloth there. The pan centre decal markings on the hob are very hard to see (especially when there''s a pan there, of course) so it''s difficult to know if your pan is centred until one side is obviously getting cold, which is not ideal for controlled cooking.The hob whinges whenever it gets any liquid near the control area, beeps and eventually turns off all the rings, so you have to restart them all, remembering what setting they were on. This is a shame, because I don''t actually use the control area, 99% of the time. I have knobs! It would be nicer if the knobs clicked and had labelled positions, but they just turn smoothly and the dial legend is useless.Cleaning the hob ought to be trivial. But there''s no way to lift the crumbs, they have to be swept over the edges. As all the edges are raised, that makes it difficult. And it beeps at you when you clean the control area. The main clock is recessed with sticking-out buttons, making it an absolute PAIN to clean. The main clock/timer/alarm is really easy to use, except that it''s too easy to accidentallychange the clock time when you meant to set the timer. You can very easily set the main oven to switch off after a time, but you can''t set it to come on. And you can''t control the second oven at all. The hob clock is more complicated -- I didn''t bother trying to remember how to use it -- but you can program the rings to turn off after a set time, I think. The manual is a joke. It is poorly worded and poorly designed -- I don''t know who it''s aimed at. It uses terms without defining them. It tells you to do things without saying how. It manages to make simple things seem difficult -- see the "everyday use" section for the hob! It very poorly explains the myriad cooking modes, and what they are intended to do -- a list of set foods with times and temperatures is pretty much all you get, which is pretty useless if those aren''t the foods you want to cook. You''ll just have to experiment, which is a shame because you risk spoiling food and might still not be able to guess what is happening inside. Why should I use top+bottom rather than turbo or turbo+grill?Having said all that, I like this cooker very much. Apart from cleaning, the long noisy cooling and lack of 275C, it is a joy to use.
