On a rainy Tuesday evening, the kind where the sky feels a bit too close to your kitchen window, Sophie stood in front of a shiny new appliance the size of a small suitcase. It had a glossy black screen, nine cooking icons glowing like a cockpit. Roast. Bake. Grill. Dehydrate. Steam. Air fry. Reheat. Slow cook. Sous-vide.
She’d queued online to grab it in a “flash sale”, watched three TikToks, one YouTube unboxing, and read a thread promising “restaurant results at home”. Now she was scrolling the 52-page manual, one hand on her phone, the other juggling a half-frozen chicken breast.
The oven behind her sat quietly, already preheated.
Yet all the hype insisted the future of cooking was in the box on her counter.
From miracle air fryers to nine‑in‑one monsters: when gadgets jump the shark
Walk into any electrical store right now and you’ll find an entire aisle that looks like a science-fiction version of your grandma’s kitchen. Rows of boxy machines promise to fry with no oil, grill like a barbecue, toast like a café, and “replace seven appliances in one”.
The newest wave goes even further, boasting nine cooking methods squeezed into a single hulking gadget. The marketing message is simple: your old air fryer is over, this is the real revolution.
Yet talk to food scientists, energy experts and plain old home cooks and a quieter story emerges. A lot of this gear is just… the same heat in a different box.
Last month, a UK consumer group tested one of these flagship nine‑in‑one machines against a standard fan oven and a decent pan on the hob. The results were quietly brutal.
Chips took roughly the same time and came out only marginally crispier than from a bargain air fryer. Roast chicken was drier than one baked in a basic oven. The “steam” function barely beat boiling water in a pot with a lid.
Their verdict? A £280 “smart cooker” that didn’t do anything dramatically better than what most people already owned. Just louder, bulkier, and far more expensive to repair.
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What experts keep repeating is that the real physics of cooking hasn’t changed: food needs heat, time and contact. Whether that heat comes from a coil in a box, gas in a burner or a fan in a mini-oven doesn’t magically transform carrots into restaurant starters.
So when brands bolt nine modes onto one machine, they’re usually re-labelling the same heating system, not reinventing it. Air fry becomes “roast”, grill becomes “bake”, dehydrate is just low heat with a fan.
The seductive promise is that owning the gadget will turn weeknight chaos into simple, tasty dinners. The reality is closer to a heavy box hogging half your worktop while your old saucepans quietly keep doing the job.
The quiet cost of “smart cooking”: money, space and mental load
There’s a less glamorous trick buried in this gadget boom: it shifts the pressure for “better” cooking from skills to shopping. You’re nudged to believe that if your food isn’t crispy, fast, healthy and photogenic, the problem is your equipment.
So you upgrade from a £70 air fryer to a nine‑mode behemoth with special racks, double baskets and an app. Then you buy accessories: skewers, silicone liners, baking inserts, a branded cookbook “optimised” for your exact model.
By the time the shine has worn off, that one purchase has quietly eaten through a month’s grocery budget.
We’ve all been there, that moment when a friend shows you their new “all‑in‑one” machine and you feel a tiny twinge of kitchen envy. They whip out salmon cooked on the steam setting, then a tray of sweet potato fries from the air fry mode.
But talk to them two months later and the story shifts. Many admit they now use only two functions out of nine. Some say they’ve gone back to their normal oven because the gadget is noisy, fiddly to clean, or just a pain to drag out from under the cupboard.
Let’s be honest: nobody really scrolls through 30 presets after a long workday; they hit the same button they used yesterday and hope for the best.
Energy experts are also raising their eyebrows. While a small air fryer can sometimes beat a big oven on running costs, those sprawling, multi-function boxes aren’t always the bargain they seem.
On low, slow settings they hum away for hours, chewing through electricity. On “max crisp” modes they spike in power, for food you could often cook just as well under a standard grill. One specialist put it bluntly in a recent interview:
“People are buying complicated heat-delivery systems when what they really need is to understand how to use the ones they already own.”
The plain truth is that most households would get more value from:
- a well-seasoned pan that heats evenly
- a reliable oven thermometer
- basic skills for roasting, searing and steaming
than from yet another countertop cube with a touchscreen and a marketing budget.
How to resist the hype and build a kitchen that actually serves you
If you’re on the fence about the latest nine‑mode wonder, start with a brutally simple test: list what you actually cook in a normal week. Not your fantasy dinner party menu. The awkward Tuesday-with-leftovers menu.
Then circle how many of those meals genuinely need a gadget you don’t already own. If you mostly roast vegetables, cook pasta, pan-fry chicken and bake the odd tray of cookies, your current kit is probably fine.
*The most underrated “upgrade” in any kitchen is learning one new basic technique, not buying one new machine.*
Another trick experts suggest is asking where the bottleneck really is. Are you short on time, or short on planning? Is your problem uneven oven heat, or the fact that you start cooking when you’re already starving?
If time is your enemy, batch-cooking once a week and freezing portions often beats chasing magical 12‑minute dinners from frozen. If your oven is unreliable, a simple countertop thermometer might change your life more than any multi-cooker.
And if your worktop is already cluttered, adding a bulky nine‑in‑one box will probably just give you one more thing to shuffle around. That silent stress has a cost too.
Cooks who’ve stepped off the gadget treadmill say the real liberation comes from accepting their own style. Some swear by a single mid-range air fryer and nothing else. Others ditched everything and went back to pans and a Dutch oven.
One chef I spoke with summed it up with a wry smile:
“**If a restaurant kitchen doesn’t need nine modes in one box, your flat probably doesn’t either.** Home cooking isn’t about chasing features, it’s about learning what your heat source does and using it well.”
So instead of chasing the next shiny launch, you might get more joy from:
- upgrading one knife that you actually use daily
- buying better-quality ingredients once a week
- keeping a tiny list of five go‑to, low-effort recipes by the fridge
That’s not as flashy as an unboxing video. **It does, though, tend to result in more edible dinners.**
Maybe the age of “more modes” is ending – and that’s no bad thing
There’s a sense that we’re hitting peak kitchen FOMO. The early air fryer craze rode on real benefits: smaller cavities heat fast, and for some people, that meant lower bills and crisper chips. Now, with every new model shouting about nine, ten or twelve functions, the returns are starting to look painfully thin.
Plenty of people are quietly selling their barely used mega‑gadgets on local marketplaces, going back to basics, and realising they don’t miss the screens or the presets. What they miss is time, calm, and the feeling that cooking is something they can handle without needing a manual.
The next “upgrade” in home cooking might not be smarter machines at all. It might simply be us deciding what we truly need on our counters, what we’re willing to clean and store, and what actually fits the way we live, rather than the way an advert wants us to live.
That’s a different kind of revolution: less about air, more about appetite.
| Key point | Detail | Value for the reader |
|---|---|---|
| Hype vs reality | Nine‑in‑one gadgets often re-label the same basic heating method | Helps avoid spending on features that don’t change results |
| True cost | High purchase price, accessories, energy use and space taken | Clarifies the long-term impact on budget and home |
| Better alternatives | Investing in skills and a few reliable tools instead of new machines | Leads to more consistent, stress-free everyday cooking |
FAQ:
- Question 1Are nine‑in‑one kitchen gadgets really a waste of money?
- Question 2Is a basic air fryer still worth buying if I already have an oven?
- Question 3Do multi‑cookers actually save energy compared with a normal oven?
- Question 4What should I prioritise if I’m building a small, efficient kitchen?
- Question 5How can I resist marketing pressure to keep upgrading my appliances?