The Multi Chef by Breville

A few months ago, the lovely wife came with one of these – a Multi Chef by Breville. Honestly, at the time I wasn’t impressed, and wished she’d gotten an espresso machine instead. What I’ve learnt since is that it’s OK to be wrong, and I was very.Breville 2

Look at all those shiny buttons. It looks gimmicky. I would rather have a machine that does one thing well, than one machine that many things so-so. Like, let’s say, an espresso machine.

The glimmer of hope was that Heston Blumenthal helped develop the Multi Chef. I like Heston, he’s a big hero of mine. Put it this way, if Heston ever asked me to do anything Westboro Baptist would call “unnatural”, I’d tell him no… but I would think about it.

But again, how many celebrity chefs have you recently seen liberally sprinkling salts, and their names, on things?  These people are rock stars of cooking, and rock stars always get paid by someone.

Well, we had this shiny tin can with it’s buttons, may as well take it for a spin.

The Multi Chef boasts one touch rice, meaning, you put in rice and water, push a single button and then wait. So, I followed their instructions, making sure that if this cocked up it wasn’t going to be user error. After what seemed like 15-20 minutes there was a beep, and a red light lit up.


Oh no, what’s this red light? What’s broken now?

Oh, it says it’s keeping the food warm.

Oh, OK, that’s pretty clever actually, but how is the rice?

Hmmmmmm… It’s actually cooked through. Not bad tin can, not bad.


I’ve cooked rice with it a few times now and it does that well. It’s a good idea to give your rice a stir once it’s done, but besides that all you do is push a button and leave it, and then feed.

The Saute, and Slow Cook functions are were always going to be easy wins for any multi-function cooker, but after the rice success there was a glimmer of hope that the Risotto function would also be a hit. The reason I didn’t just start there is because:

  1. We cook with rice more than risotto, so it doesn’t matter too much to me if that function sucked.
  2. This machine “stole” my coffee machine dreams, so I cooked rice that night because I had to.

There is a reason Risotto is the “death dish” on Ozzy Masterchef, and that’s because it’s a pain in the ass. Risotto rice is like dog food pellets. Add some water it will make it’s own gravy. Yes, I know that’s not really fair, but it kinda is. For those that haven’t made risotto, the creaminess this rice gives is from its high starch content, that goes into suspension and thickens up your rice dish. The problem is you have to continually beat the starch out by stirring, and stirring, and more bloody stirring.

This machine says it can do all of that by pressing a button and leaving it. Bare in mind, there are NO little paddles or elves in this machine. Nothing gets stirred at all. Instead they seem to use magic.

I don’t know how they do it exactly, but they do. No-stir risotto with a push of button!

At the moment the Multi Chef goes for around R1500, which is pretty cheap considering it does almost everything. You could probably even make bread in there… I am going to totally make bread in there!

This is fantastic for all those winter stews, showing off with a risotto, or even frying bacon.

It turns out, I don’t drink nearly as much coffee as I thought, and cook rice every chance I get.

{This is not a sponsored post. All thoughts and images are my own.}