Nice full glass cooker but I need more practice with the small oven
4/5
I've been using an all gas cooker for over 30 years. This cooker is slightly different in that while it has a gas hob, main oven and small oven, the small oven also doubles as an electric grill. The electric grill, timer and ignition required no special wiring as they plug into a single standard 3 pin socket.
It looks striking, with an all black finish and glass doors on both ovens along with a glass lid for the hob which activates a safety feature when closed that cuts off the gas to the hob burners when the lid is down.
The controls are easy to use, simply push the dial in, which activates the ignition, and twist clockwise to the desired setting, keeping the dial pushed in until the burner/oven is lit.
As previously mentioned, the small oven doubles as an electric grill, which is activated in a similar way to the gas controls except the dial is pushed in and twisted anticlockwise to the grill setting. The small oven cavity can be used as either the electric grill or the small gas oven, not both at the same time. Both oven cavities have self cleaning walls and the hob is easy to clean.
The hob has one large burner, two medium burners and one small burner giving plenty of versatility and the dials give plenty of control. Cooking using the hob is as expected.
Cooking results using the main oven have been good, with food turning out as expected. The electric grill works as expected but I have only toasted things and will more than likely use a toaster instead of the grill.
The small oven is the reason it gets only 4 stars. When cooking a 10" pizza on a pizza stone, the pizza was more well done towards the back of the oven. I'm sure this can be remedied by turning the pizza halfway through. The second thing I noticed, (which is probably a good thing for energy saving), is that following normal cooking instructions the food is overcooked. I remedied this by reducing the Gas Mark by 1 and reducing the cooking time slightly. I'm sure this is due to the cavity being smaller but am surprised it wasn't mentioned in the manual.
All in all, this is a very nice looking cooker and it performs well. While my results using the small oven haven't been perfect, I'm sure this will improve with practice. If you are looking to buy a full glass cooker to fit in a 55cm space in your kitchen this is a very nice cooker which is just as well as at the time of my purchase, this was the only model that was available (at all the retailers I checked) to fit the 55cm space. The only variables were three colour options, two of which were available from AO, all other specifications were identical but the black option from AO was the least expensive.
Mike