Not everyone has the biggest countertop and space to spare, and even if we did, you mightn’t want to share it with every extra device made for cooking.
As good as appliances can be, their ability to consume countertop space can be an enormous frustration. Your kitchen counter is meant to prepare food, and not necessarily house the gadgets that help you prepare it. And yet these days, there are so many gadgets that can be useful in this way.
Toaster. Kettle. Coffee maker. Air fryer. Portable cooktop. Blender. Juicer. Mixer. Food processor. And so on and so on. You can find a gadget that handles lots of little different things, or you can consider converging the concepts to bring it all together.
For instance, while a coffee machine isn’t technically a kettle, it may be used to heat water in much the same way, particularly if it’s an automatic machine. And depending on the fruit, some blenders can be used as juicers.
Tefal is about to attempt that whole convergence thing in another way, revealing an air fryer that’s also an induction cooker, and essentially creating a small appliance made for cooking for one (or two if you maybe didn’t eat quite as much together).
The concept is called the “YumMeal”, and while the name is a little on the cringe side, the concept is interesting: an air fryer at the top with a built-in induction cooker at the bottom, allowing a machine to effectively heat and cook using two methods, and keep the food inside of a reusable bowl that can be stored for later.
We’ve seen reusable containers like this in the Ninja Crispi Pro, a gadget that also combines air frying with baking and dehydrating, but Tefal’s take on the air fryer combo is a little different. Instead, it acts a little like a one-pot multi-cooker, having you throw in the ingredients, mix and combine, and then let the machine do its thing.
It’s not quite a Thermomix, but it’s also not meant to be. Focused on food for one, the combination of induction cooking at the bottom and an air fryer component at the top effectively turns the YumMeal into a compact oven of sorts, able to make food in the dish it’s cooking in, and then letting you take it out, and just eating from it, or simply serving.
This is a gadget that can cook using an induction top, an air fryer, or both, and could replace needing an oven for some people. It can technically do a simple serving of a pancake, though that may be its caveat.
The single serving approach does mean the Tefal YumMeal launches with that limitation: food is typically sized for one person, and increasing the ingredients may also mean it won’t cook. It’s a small pan of sorts, holding a maximum of 1.2 litres, smaller than the 2.3 litre minimum of the Ninja Crispi Pro and the 1.4 litre container of the smaller Ninja Crispi model, though both of those lack the induction cooktop.
However, the focus for the YumMeal is that solo style of living, and for some people, that might be all that matters. They might even upgrade to something else when they move beyond solo living.
Australians curious about the concept will find the Tefal YumMeal will find it in stores shortly, priced from $399.
