cooking

Haden 4-in-1 Air Fryer Microwave review

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A photo of the Haden Air Fryer Microwave

It may surprise you to hear that we haven’t owned an air fryer until recently. They’re really popular, especially as, when compared with a regular convection oven, they can cook food faster and more cheaply. The cost of living crisis, and huge increase in energy bills, led many people towards buying these and I know lots of people who swear by them.

Anyway, we do now own an air fryer, in the form of this Haden 4-in-1 Air Fryer Microwave (sponsored link). It’s a microwave that can also act as an air fryer, a grill, and a convection oven. You can buy one from Amazon for £150, but we picked up ours from the middle aisle of our local Lidl for £120 a few weeks ago.

So why haven’t we owned an air fryer until now?

There are two key reasons why it’s taken us this long to buy an air fryer. The first is a lack of space; when we had our kitchen renovated in 2022, we ended up with less work surface space (but more usable space overall). There wasn’t really any room to keep a large air fryer out on the work surface, but nor did we want to be lifting a big air fryer out of a cupboard every time we wanted to use it. We also didn’t want to buy a small air fryer that wouldn’t serve our needs.

The second is that Christine wasn’t convinced by them. For her, Jay Rayner’s 2022 article criticising them was proof that they weren’t worth it. Also, in the kitchen renovation we had two full-size convection ovens installed, so there wasn’t much need.

This air fryer microwave gets around the space issue, by replacing one of the appliances that was already taking up space on our kitchen work surface. Our previous microwave pre-dates our relationship (which is 16 years as of tomorrow), and was only a cheap own-brand model from Tesco. It had a bit of metal missing, and as a 800 watt model, wasn’t as fast as newer microwaves on the market. Replacing it with an air fryer microwave would give us a more useful appliance, in the same space.

What it’s like to use

The controls are relatively straightforward – more so than our previous microwave. It defaults to microwave mode, but you can press the ‘grill’, ‘air fryer’ or ‘micro+conv’ buttons first to change the mode. In air fryer and oven mode, you select the temperature in degrees Celsius, and then the cooking time, before pressing the big start button. There are shortcut buttons to quickly add 30 seconds, a minute or five minutes. There are also presets for pizza, chicken and popcorn.

It is quite noisy, and the fan sometimes stays on after cooking – especially in air fryer mode.

As a microwave, it works well; the extra hundred watts of power reducing cooking time compared to our old microwave. Meanwhile, to use it as an air fryer, you pop a metal stand on top of the glass microwave plate with your food on. That means the food still rotates on the stand in air fryer mode, like it would in a regular microwave. In this mode, it can use up to 1500 watts of power, which is equivalent to dedicated stand-alone models.

We’ve yet to use the grill and convection oven modes, so I can’t comment on those.

Compromises

Any multi-function device is going to have some compromises, when compared with dedicated appliances. Taking our Instant Pot for example: it can slow cook, but you have to set the cooking temperature higher. This Haden air fryer microwave works well as a microwave, as mentioned above, but as an air fryer it isn’t as good as a dedicated appliance would be. The cooking times are longer; indeed, generally it needs to cook food for about the same time as in an oven. It does save a bit of time, as there’s no need to pre-heat it like you would with a regular oven, and it’s heating a smaller space and so should use less energy. But it’s not significantly faster than an oven in the way that a dedicated air fryer would be.

The other compromise is when you want to use multiple functions sequentially. For example, we air fried some sausages, and then wanted to use the microwave function to steam some broccoli to serve as part of the same meal. Unfortunately, the glass microwave plate was still really hot, and so not suitable for using with the plastic microwave steamer basket. As our old microwave wasn’t fit to pass on to a charity shop, we salvaged its glass plate before taking it to be recycled; thankfully this fits the new microwave and so we can swap the plates around if one gets too warm.

Verdict

So, should you consider a combination air fryer and microwave? If you’re pushed for space, then sure – you get what would normally be several separate appliances combined into one neat package. And at £150, it may be cheaper than buying the appliances individually, if you’re starting from scratch.

However, if you have the space for a microwave and an air fryer, and the money to spare, you’ll probably get better results from a dedicated air fryer than this combination model – especially if you plan to use it regularly. That being said, this Haden model is very much at the budget end, and others are available which may offer better results. There’s a Toshiba model (sponsored link) which includes a steamer basket and currently sells for £170 (normally £250). Panasonic’s microwaves tend to be highly rated, so you could consider their 4-in-1 model (sponsored link), but it’s currently £360. That’s three times as much as what we paid for our Haden model.

Cooking with a slow cooker

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A photo of our Instant Pot, which we use as a slow cooker. In front of it are several slow cooker cookbooks

Typically every other week, we have a slow-cooked meal at home. Along with sous vide cooking, which I wrote about last month, slow cooking a form of low temperature cooking where the food isn’t heated as much, but cooked for longer.

We use our Instant Pot as a slow cooker. During my blogging hiatus, I wrote on Medium why a multi-cooker is a good slow cooker. The gist of it being that you can use its timer features both to delay the start, and reduce the cooking temperature at the end to keep the food warm. However, the Instant Pot’s sauté mode is also helpful, if you need to pre-fry ingredients before starting the slow cooker timer. It’s not perfect, and there are some things that you need to bear in mind when using an Instant Pot as a slow cooker, as the temperature modes are not always comparable.

We used to have a dedicated slow cooker, but it was basic, and took up space that we needed for the more capable Instant Pot. The most basic models have one heat setting and turn on as soon as they’re plugged in, but many include multiple temperature settings and timers now.

Benefits of using a slow cooker

To me, there are several benefits of using a slow cooker over cooking meals using ‘traditional’ high heat methods.

The first of these is cost. Generally, it will cost less to run a slow cooker, even for several hours, than a hob or an oven for a shorter period. This is especially true for us, as we have solar panels – a slow cooker lets us do the majority of cooking during daylight hours with our free solar energy. In the winter, it’s dark when we get home after work and, even with a home battery, the amount of energy needed to run an oven means that we have to pay to use grid energy. I suspect that the cost of living crisis is one reason why slow cooking has become more popular in recent years.

Many slow cooker recipes simply require you to put the ingredients in the slow cooker, and leave it. They’re therefore quick to prepare, with no need to stir or keep an eye on a pan. You can put the ingredients in and turn the slow cooker on before leaving for work, and come home to a delicious meal that doesn’t require any work. If I’m working at home, I tend to put slow cooker meals on during my lunch break. Friends of mine who have issues with chronic fatigue find slow cooker recipes really beneficial, as it means they have something to eat at the end of the day which doesn’t require preparation, even when they’ve run out of spoons.

As with other low temperature cooking methods like sous vide, slow cooking is great for tenderising tougher cuts of meat like brisket. Coincidentally, these tend to be the cheaper cuts, and so you can save money this way too.

Not just soups and casseroles

There’s a perception that you can only use slow cookers for liquid-based meals like soups, stews, curries and casseroles. That’s not actually the case, and you can cook a wide variety of meals if you layer the ingredients correctly. In some cases, you essentially steam-cook ingredients that sit on top of others. Some recipes allow you to add rice, noodles or pasta shortly before the end, so that you can cook an entire meal in one pot.

That being said, one thing you are not going to get from using a slow cooker is anything crispy. That crispiness comes about thanks to the Maillard reaction, which usually requires cooking temperatures of at least 115°C. Even on their highest settings, slow cookers do not get as high as that. As such, some recipes call for ingredients like meat to be flash fried before or after slow cooking.

Slow cooker cookbooks

Last summer, I wrote about our go-to cookbooks, which included Nathan Anthony’s Bored of Lunch book (sponsored link). He has also written a follow-up – Bored of Lunch – Even Easier (sponsored link) which I’ve included in the photo above. We don’t use this as often as the first book, but there’s a nice recipe for Butter Chicken in there which uses yoghurt rather than cream. We also picked up his latest book, 6 Ingredient Slow Cooker (sponsored link), last weekend. It looks good but we’ve not attempted any of the recipes in there yet.

The first slow cooker book we bought was Slow Cooker Heaven by Lorna Brash (sponsored link) which is published by The National Trust. There are some good recipes in there, but they’re quite involved – some of them require a lot of preparation prior to turning the slow cooker on, or ask you to make your own spice mixes from scratch.

More recently we’ve picked up Poppy Cooks – The Actually Delicious Slow Cooker cookbook (sponsored link) by Poppy O’Toole. Poppy is apparently the ‘potato queen of Tiktok’, and used to be a professional chef before ending up out of work due to the Covid lockdown in 2020. Her recipes are generally also quite simple, and a little more authentic. We’ve cooked quite a few recipes from this book recently – Honey Garlic Chicken Thighs probably being my favourite.

For us, slow cooking tends to work best if I’m either working at home, or if Christine is working on a weekend. In the latter case, she can be held up and may not finish until 7pm, in which case it’s great coming home knowing that dinner can be ready and on the table within a few minutes, and with little effort.

Sous vide cooking in an Instant Pot

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An Instant Pot Duo Plus set to sous vide mode with 29 hours and 49 minutes left to run

If you have one of the higher tier models of Instant Pot, then you may well have a ‘sous vide’ button on it. We’ve used sous vide cooking a few times with our Instant Pot Duo Plus to make tasty meals, as it’s relatively easy to do.

Sous vide is French for ‘under vacuum’. Essentially, to cook something using the sous vide method, you put it in a vacuum-sealed bag, and then put it in a heated water bath (also known as a bain marie) inside your Instant Pot. Depending on the recipe, this can be quite quick, or take many hours. In the photo example, we were cooking some beef brisket for 30 hours.

There’s some instructions for how to set your Instant Pot to sous vide here. As well as setting the cooking time, you also need to set the temperature, using the buttons or dial on the front of your Instant Pot. Once it’s going, we use a glass lid (sponsored link) that we bought separately rather than the pressure cooker lid, so that you can see inside.

Sous vide without an Instant Pot

The sous vide cooking technique has been around since 1974, when it was pioneered by a French chef (hence the name). But the need to keep the water at a constant temperature means that it’s a difficult technique for home cooks to adopt without specialist equipment. You need something that forms a feedback loop between a temperature gauge, and the heat source. Of course, you could probably have a thermometer inside the bain marie and constantly adjust the heat yourself, but this isn’t feasible for recipes that take a long time. Thankfully, many models of Instant Pot will provide this feedback loop as part of their sous vide feature, so you can set and leave it.

If you don’t have an Instant Pot, or you have a more basic model without a sous vide mode, Amazon will sell you a sous vide wand (sponsored link) for around £50 that you can pop in your bain marie. The wand will provide the heat and measure the temperature. More advanced models can be configured with a smartphone app – a friend has such a model. It lets you set how well-cooked you want a piece of steak, for example, and sets the time and temperature accordingly.

Vacuum sealing

The other aspect of sous vide cooking is that you should vacuum seal your food, before it goes in the bain marie. We bought our vacuum sealer from the middle aisle of Lidl, of all places – in fact, it was a Lidl in France, and so we have to use a UK plug adaptor with it. Again, if you need a vacuum sealer, Amazon will sell you one for around £23 (sponsored link), and expect to pay £11-£15 for two rolls of bags.

If you don’t want to buy one, then you may get away with just a regular plastic food bag with as much air squeezed out of it as possible.

What we’ve cooked using sous vide

I’m mentioned that we’ve cooked beef brisket using the sous vide technique, and indeed we’ve done so more than once. Brisket contains a lot of connective tissue, and so you need to use slower cooking methods to allow this tissue to break down. Sous vide is perfect for this, and after 30 hours, you’ll end up with a very meaty piece of meat.

We’ve also done duck confit this way, which then went into a cassoulet. Again, this was a long and slow recipe, taking around 12 hours with the cooking temperature set to 75° C.

It’s worth noting that, whilst you can cook steak using the sous vide method, you won’t get any browning on the outside. If this is something you want, then you’ll still need to flash fry the meat at a higher heat after it’s come out of the bain marie.

In summary, sous vide cooking, whilst requiring some forward planning and investing in the correct equipment, is also relatively easy. You can prepare some really tasty food ahead of time, and have it cook slowly at a regulated temperature. Plus, because the food is vacuum sealed, it’s a less messy way of cooking too. We don’t do it very often, but the few times we have done it have always been worth it.

The Sad Bastard Cookbook

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The cover of the Sad Bastard Cookbook

According to a bit of pseudoscience commissioned twenty years ago by a now defunct satellite holiday channel, today is ‘Blue Monday‘ and therefore the most depressing day of the year. It’s also depressing this year specifically for another reason. With this in mind, today’s blog post is about the Sad Bastard Cookbook, which has recipes for when you need to eat but don’t have the spoons to cook something.

If you want to buy the Sad Bastard Cookbook as an actual, physical paperback, here’s the link to buy it on Amazon (sponsored link). But you don’t need to pay for it – there’s an official free PDF download.

Low effort recipes

The whole idea of the Sad Bastard Cookbook is that the recipes require minimal effort, and generally use ingredients that don’t go out of date at short notice. As an example, the first three sections focus on instant noodles (ramen), starting with simply boiling water for the ramen and then eating them. Many recipes also have a ‘bottom-tier’, ‘mid-tier’ and ‘God-tier’, depending on how you’re feeling and what extra ingredients you have. One of these is ‘kinda like Pad Thai’, which uses rice noodles, peanut butter and sweet chilli sauce, and “tastes kinda like you’d imagine Pad Thai sauce would taste if you’ve never had Pad Thai before”.

Other recipes include ‘pasta in a rice cooker’ and ‘can of soup’.

Core ingredients

Here’s the bit of the book that is probably most useful – the ‘Core ingredients to keep in your kitchen’ section. There are lots of good suggestions for basic and long-life ingredients to buy, and keep on hand for times when you don’t feel like cooking but need to eat something. Even if you’re the sort of person who can usually cook something delicious, no matter how you’re feeling, it’s a really useful list of what to have on hand. I wish that past me had this for times when I’ve lived on my own, as it would’ve given me some fallback ideas for meals.

Like I said, the book is available as a free PDF – even if your mental health is fine, I strongly recommend reading it. You’ll pick up some useful hints for times when you’re late home and tired, or realise that you’re hungry at 10pm on a Sunday when the shops are all shut.

Our go-to cookbooks

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A photo of the four cookbooks mentioned in this blog post

Cooking at home is one of my wife’s passions, although it’s something I enjoy too. Over the years, we’ve amassed a selection of cookbooks, but there are four that we use the most at present. So, partly as a way of sharing nice recipes, and partly as a cynical way of getting Amazon affiliate commission, here are our four go-to cookbooks.

All the links to Amazon below pay me a small amount of commission should you choose to buy these books from there. However, we often borrow cookbooks from our local libraries. I’ve also added links where some of these recipes are available online.

A photo of the cover of the India Express cookbook by Rukmini Iyer

India Express by Rukmini Iyer

Of the four cookbooks mentioned today, India Express by Rukmini Iyer is our newest. We found it first in our local library, and then bought a copy as there were so many recipes that we wanted to try. All the recipes are vegan, vegetarian or pescatarian, and are generally quite quick – almost all can be done in an hour and many less.

Our favourite recipe so far is Spiced Roasted Paneer with Tomatoes and Peppers (available at this link). Paneer is an Indian soft cheese that you can usually get at larger supermarkets – our local Sainsbury’s stocks it in the chilled world food section. The recipe is basically a traybake – preheat the oven, put the ingredients in a roasting tin, and cook for 30 minutes. We’ve also enjoyed the South Indian-Style Black Pepper & Fennel Prawns recipe and had this a couple of times.

A photo of the cover of 'Bored of Lunch: The Healthy Slow Cooker Book' by Nathan Anthony

Bored of Lunch by Nathan Anthony

Nathan Anthony’s Bored of Lunch: The Healthy Slow Cooker Book, is apparently the biggest selling slow cooker cookbook in UK publishing history. I can see why – there’s some really good recipes, and the majority just require you to throw all the ingredients together and leave the slow cooker to do its thing. Other slow cooker cookbooks add on significant extra preparation, and undermine much of the ease and time saving that a slow cooker offers.

We typically have a slow cooker meal once a fortnight, using the slow cook mode on our Instant Pot. Almost all of the recipes come from this book, and the most recent we had was the Chicken and Peanut Curry, made from peanut butter and coconut milk. We also like the Thai Basil Beef and Gin-Infused Spiced Beef, and I was really impressed with the Garlic Parmesan Chicken with Potatoes which involves layering the ingredients to get a full meal in one pot. We also have the follow-up, Even Easier, but use the first book more.

A photo of the cover of the Persiana Everyday cook book by Sabrina Ghayour

Persiana Everyday by Sabrina Ghayour

We’re both big fans of Sabrina Ghayour’s Persiana cookbook, but we use the follow-up Persiana Everyday more often. I would recommend both if you like Middle Eastern cookery or food with a lot of flavour. We’ve recently tried the Sage Butter, Feta & Black Pepper Pasta, and our favourites are the Baked Halloumi and Za’atar, Paprika & Garlic Chicken.

There’s also some good side-dish recipes, especially for making flavoured rice.

A photo of the cover of Nigella Express by Nigella Lawson

Nigella Express by Nigella Lawson

Christine had this book when I met her, and though it was published 17 years ago, it still gets plenty of use. We have several of Nigella’s cookbooks, but Nigella Express is the one we use the most.

We recently had Mirin-Glazed Salmon for the first time, and Chicken Schnitzel with Bacon and White Wine is a favourite of ours. No Churn Pomegranate Ice Cream is a great base for lots of ice cream flavours that can be made without a dedicated ice cream maker.

Honourable mentions

We don’t own it, but we’ve cooked several good recipes from Donal Skehan’s Super Food in Minutes – we particularly like his Red Lentil Daal which we have with paratha. Most of the recipes in this book come with lots of vegetables.

If you have an Instant Pot, or another brand of pressure cooker, then Modern Pressure Cooking by Catherine Phipps is a worthwhile purchase.

Dishonourable mentions

My wife has gotten rid of several of her cookbooks recently, having not really used them. Jamie Oliver’s 15 and 30 Minute Meals both went – I’m sure you could cook the meals in 30 minutes with a full team of staff but they seemed to take us far longer. We also picked up the first two River Café cookbooks at a charity shop, and they’ll probably end up back there soon too. The Grains as Mains book seemed like a good idea, but we were underwhelmed – some are really basic recipes that just happen to have some extra wholegrains sprinkled on.

George Egg – Anarchist Cook

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Photos of the recipe cards from George Egg's Anarchist Cook show.

Last week, as part of the British Science Festival, we went to see George Egg perform his show ‘Anarchist Cook’ at The Studio theatre in Bradford. George Egg is a touring stand-up comedian who consequently spends a lot of time in budget hotels. As he finishes his comedy gigs in the late evenings, it’s often difficult to find any decent food available (apart from pizza and kebab shops).

So, the show is based on the premise of: what can you cook in an average hotel room, using only the equipment that’s there?

This is, of course, bearing in mind that you don’t usually get a cooker, oven or any cooking utensils in an average hotel room. Instead, George Egg cooks a three course meal in just over an hour, using an iron, a kettle, a pillow case, some of the complementary salt and pepper sachets, some foraged plants from hotel reception, and a Gideon Bible.

The starter includes crostini toasted on the iron, ricotta that had been strained through a pillow case using UHT milk sachets (209 sachets to be exact), and a salad with leaves from a spider plant (which until now I didn’t know was edible). For the main course, he steamed sea bass in the travel kettle, and desert was pancakes, again cooked on the iron.

These were just three of the recipes that George has come up with, and he mentions others in his show. This includes curing your own salami sausages (requires a hotel room with removal ceiling tiles and being able to request the same room a few weeks later), and making bread using a complimentary wine bottle as a rolling pin and the countertop in the bathroom.

It was a good show, clocking in at around an hour long, and the audience were invited to try the food at the end. Alas, by the time we’d made it out, it had all been eaten – the show was free, funded by the science festival’s sponsors, and so it was a full house. We did, however, buy the recipe cards – although we’ll probably use more conventional cooking utensils to make them.

The Anarchist Cook show has recently run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and George Egg is due to reprise it at a couple of dates in Wales next month. Hopefully he’ll be able to tour it elsewhere soon as it’s a good show to watch – it’s both entertaining, and educational. If not, he also has plenty of stand-up dates coming up as well.

Disclosure: I work for the University of Bradford who were this year’s host of the British Science Festival.