The grill of your dreams

Kitchen gadgets are big business - last year we spent more than £8m on chocolate fountains alone. Andrew Shanahan reveals 2008's most wanted culinary gizmos

Every kitchen has a cupboard of shame. Crammed inside are all those chicken bricks, chocolate fountains and pasta mangles we never use. You would have thought we would have learned our lesson by now but not so. We are buying more culinary paraphernalia than ever.

Last year we spent £625m on kitchen gadgets, according to GfK Marketing Services, including more than £8m on chocolate fountains alone, up 240% on the previous two years. What will become the must-have kitchen accoutrements of 2008, and will any of them change our gastronomic lives?


This is a circular grill that sits in the middle of a dining table and comes with several miniature pans, which guests can use to cook their own dishes. Conceptually, it is similar to the fondue, in that guests share a central resource, but the raclette offers a wider range of possibilities. As with the fondue, the raclette originated in Switzerland and traditionally is used to melt slices of raclette cheese which is then scraped ("racler" is French for "to scrape") on to boiled potatoes and various cold meats.

While a traditional raclette is undoubtedly a wonderful thing, by dispensing with the cheese and allowing your guests to use the hotplate and pans to cook their own food, you can create a brilliant, low-hassle dinner party. Simply prepare bowls of raw ingredients (marinated strips of steak, chicken, shellfish, vegetables, etc) and assemble a range of flavourings and condiments (mustards, ginger, garlic, chilli etc) and let people concoct their own dishes.

Raclettes are especially good for parties where guests may be fussy or have allergies, as everyone can choose their own menu. Best of all, though, any poor cooking is in no way the responsibility of the host.

Andrew James is a highly recommended supplier as it offers an excellent range of grills (from £49.50) and seems to be staffed by the world's most enthusiastic racletteers (

St Lucia Coalpot

Most new gadgets are launched by massive corporations, but the force behind St Lucia Coalpots ( is Sylvia Siddans, a housewife from Lincolnshire with no commercial experience, who stumbled across her discovery while on holiday. Business is now booming for Siddans, who describes her forays into importing as the result of "a midlife crisis of sorts".

A St Lucia Coalpot is a small hand-moulded barbecue with not only the traditional grill but also a shaped earthenware pot which sits directly among the mango wood charcoal. This means that dishes such as jerk chicken can be barbecued and then stewed.

The coalpots are made by women in St Lucia, in a very small area of the country's Piton mountains. Siddans says this exclusivity is undoubtedly part of the coalpot's appeal, "They can't be churned out in hundreds of thousands. If you mass-produced it then it wouldn't be the same thing. I love using them. It's little things like when you clean the pot out and it's wet, it smells like St Lucia after the rain."

It certainly makes a fine, dinky, back-garden barbecue and if you use one you will be in good company - Jamie Oliver used one to smoke beetroots in his last TV series.

Sous-vide digital bath

Digital baths are used in some of the most exclusive kitchens across the UK from Le Manoir to Tom Aikens. Despite the imposing title, these gadgets are really nothing more complicated than a bath of water that works in a similar fashion to a deep-fat fryer.

The advantage of these gadgets is that they enable sous-vide cookery (from the French meaning "under vacuum"). This involves vacuum-sealing food in an airtight bag and then cooking it slowly in the bath at a low temperature. Chefs love sous-vide because it gives a precise degree of control, true succulence, an incredible retention of flavours and aromas and preserves even more nutrients than steaming.

One considerable potential disadvantage is botulism. Because the food is cooked at such low temperatures bacteria are sometimes not killed off - so utmost care is required if you are experimenting at home. The best advice is to use only top-quality materials from trusted suppliers and establish what the minimum temperatures are for the produce. Then make sure you reach them by testing with a probe thermometer. You should always, of course, follow all basic hygiene guidelines when preparing your food.

One of the best retailers is Clifton Food Range (, which initially made the water baths as precision laboratory equipment for experiments but soon found that adventurous chefs were starting to buy them up. Domestic baths cost £500 for a starter unit. You can experiment with sous-vide on the cheap by buying a food sealer (try the Food Sealer from for under £40) and an excellent thermometer (both to test the food and keep the temperature of your water consistent), but if you want precision then a sous-vide digital bath is the thing.

Home smoker

You can smoke practically any food you care to mention, and the nice thing about doing it yourself, aside from the glorious smells, is the process of trial and error that uncovers the occasional gem (such as home-smoked garlic), which makes up for the occasional disaster (smoked bread tastes like a bar towel).

It's relatively easy to make your own smoker and the edible projects section of shows you how, but if you want a gadget to do it for you then you would struggle to find something sleeker and more efficient than the ProQ range from It is portable and versatile (foods can be barbecued, roasted or smoked in the same unit), and the temperature gauge is a nice touch. Ultimately, though, the glossy pill design alone will probably shift a lot of units, which start at £95.

Pressure cooker

At the extreme end of the pressure-cooking scale you have the Gastrovac, which is a frighteningly industrial piece of equipment that allows you to fry and cook foods in a vacuum. Chefs such as Simon Rogan from L'Enclume use the Gastrovac because it allows them to preserve the texture and nutrients of food while cooking. The other advantage is the "sponge effect" that occurs when atmospheric pressure is restored and the food absorbs the flavours and liquid it has been cooking in. Unfortunately, a commercial Gastrovac costs around £2,500, so we domestic chefs will have to look for a simpler version ... which leads us to a device that is long overdue for critical re-appraisal: the pressure cooker.

It may not be cutting edge (it has been around since 1939) but a pressure cooker shares several advantages with the Gastrovac. The hugely reliable Tower brand cookers (0845 658 9700 for stockists) are excellent for stews and curries. They excel at making the most of cheaper cuts of meat, which would normally take several hours to render edible. In a pressure cooker these cook to melting perfection within half an hour. Pressure cookers work because the boiling point of water rises under pressure - so they can replicate the effect of a long simmering.

As longer working hours reduce the time we have to prepare food, a pressure cooker can almost make you believe that you're the sort of person organised enough to have marinated your food in advance.

· This article was amended on Friday January 18 2008. The French phrase "sous vide" was mistranslated as "under pressure" in the article above. It means vacuum packed or, literally, "under vacuum". This has been corrected.