Vonshef Digital Multi Cooker Review

The Vonshef Digital Multi Cooker is a good looking bit of kit that offers lots of functionality in a compact form.

In the box you get the cooking robot, various accessories to aid with cooking, a metal pan and a plastic stirring arm that is used with certain modes.

The instructions are fine for helping you initially set up the unit and learning about the simple control panel, but they offer little assistance beyond this, some examples of how you use each mode would’ve been greatly appreciated as it’s not always clear what you should or shouldn’t be using this for.

The Vonshef unit itself has a transparent dome which you open to add/remove items. The main metallic tray is used in all operations, the stirring arm needs to be attached for things like stir frying (the clues in the name with that one!) and there is a small metal wire rack that is used with the steaming function.

To use any of the modes just press the corresponding button, set the desired time and temperature, and then press start. Keep in mind you’ll need to add on about 5 minutes to allow it to heat up as you would with a normal grill.

The grill mode is a good general mode allowing you to easily add items to ‘grill’, but rather than sitting under heating elements the food sits on top of them, with the elements heating the metal plate. Like a grill you need to remember to turn things over to prevent it being burnt on one side and not cooked on the other.

The stir fry mode is a little different, it still cooks via heating the main plate food sits on, but this time you add the stirring arm which will periodically stir the food being cooked. Mixed success with this one, tried a an actual stir fry but ended up moving everything over to a wok. Had better luck with chips, although as you’ll see in the review video the potatoes initially just got pushed around but by the end of the cooking process they were being stirred as you’d expect.

The steaming feature works well, pop water in the tray and you’ll see the unit filling with steam. Unfortunately the unit did leak water on both sides, making steaming a rather messy option as it leaves you with a puddle of water to tidy up.

Due to the design it can actually be rather tricky to extract cooked food from the Robo Chef, there isn’t an easy way of tipping the food out and this is made more complicated with the stirring arm fitted as food can hide at the back.

However, on the plus side even when cooking at high temperatures the outside of the unit doesn’t get dangerously hot, it gets warm but not so hot it could burn you, an amazing accomplishment given this heats up to 220 degrees C.

Overall this offers a good small form factor with lots of versatility, but it’s let down by it dribbling water and the need for much better instructions to help you understand how to use each of the modes and some indication on how to safely extract the food once cooked.

Available from Amazon UK: https://amzn.to/1QPzF0t.  Other VonShef products are available from Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/1PEBC1b