Gadgets: Tefal Jamie Oliver Multi Cooker

The kitchen is a hotly contested gadget arena. Tefal has teamed up with Jamie Oliver for the Multi Cooker in an attempt to convince us that the pressure cooker deserves a place in the 21st-century kitchen. Let's not beat about the bush - 99 is a lot to spend when you've most likely already got a pan, hob and oven that do the same job already. In response, Tefal claim that the Multi Cooker delivers one-pot cooking convenience with up to 70 per cent faster cooking times. A real world example is pot roast chicken - taking only 25 minutes in the Multi Cooker compared to three times this in your oven.

Unlike a normal pressure cooker, the Multi Cooker has a series of light up options on the front - high pressure, low pressure, browning, saut, simmer and keep warm. My recipe challenge was pot roast chicken. Stage one of the 30-minute recipe involved setting the Multi Cooker to "browning" and using the base to brown all sides of the chicken. The same setting fried the bacon and mushrooms before the chicken was popped back in and cooked on high pressure mode for 25 minutes. Finally I used the steamer basket to produce some rather succulent baby leeks. There aren't many recipes in the included book, but this one worked well. Most satisfyingly the only thing needing washed up was the removable basket - even the cider sauce could be finished off in the Multi Cooker. With various fancy safety features built-in and a handy timer with auto "keep warm", the Multi Cooker is definitely impressive.

For me, the key factor was convenience - bung stuff in and it's finished quicker than a Scottish summer - whether that's soup in six minutes or roast chicken in half an hour.

This article first appeared in The Scotsman, Saturday September 11, 2010