What cooking gadgets do I need to survive without a cooker (aga)

[BergamotMouse]

I have an aga. It's our only cooking source. But with gas prices as they are I want to turn it off for the summer.

I don't want to fill the cupboards with lots of cooking gadgets so what's the bare minimum we could get away with.

I thinking:
Slow cooker
Combi microwave
Air fryer

But not sure how we'd do pasta and rice etc.

Perhaps a single induction plate.

Has anyone made the same choice and survived the summer?

I realise this is quite a specific audience!!

Get an all in one like a Ninja.

Those single induction hobs are the business and will work with cast iron cookware. Combi microwave and air fryer sounds like a good combination.

My parents have a solid fuel Rayburn that they don't light in the summer. They use a portable induction hob doodad from ikea - www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/tillreda-portable-induction-hob-1-zone-white-70493503/

And they ended up sacrificing half a kitchen cupboard for a normal small/standard electric oven for baking etc as they haven't lit it in summer since I was a child. They don't have a microwave but do have a toaster to save having to have a grill in the oven, kept the size down.

15 in 1 Ninja - bakes, airfrys, pressure cooks etc but they aren't that big, I reckon ok for 4. You can cook a whole meal in them by layering the food.

One of the IKEA induction hobs, these come in double too but not all pans work on them.

You can cook pasta and rice in a slow cooker.

You can cook rice in a microwave

Air fryer and slow cooker or one of those padded bag type things ? You heat the item up and place in the padded bag and it slow cooks .

We ended up getting rid of the Aga, partly for this reason (and because we may as well have been burning £20 notes, it was so expensive to run), but the previous owners had an old cooker tucked away that they could use in the summer (although from what I could tell they just kept the Aga running through summer, and kept all the windows and doors open constantly).

But I would have an induction plate and a microwave (and be pissed off)

I have a crockpot multi cooker that pressure cooks, sautés, simmers and slow cooks (amongst other things) a ninja 400 dual air fryer and a microwave.

my oven is completely redundant and the hob is only used for frying eggs these days.

I have a systema microwave rice cooker, which was about a tenner and cooks rice perfectly.

I grew up in a house with an oil fuelled Aga. We still had a cooker which got used mainly in the summer. By the time you buy a few gadgets to cook on, you may as well get a cooker. Although having said that, I do love our Ninja 11 in 1, but there is only me and DH now. Any more people than that and I do need to use the cooker.

We’ve just had our oil fired aga removed ( too expensive and inefficient to keep , and we’re soon having a new kitchen installed )
We have
Airfryer
Microwave
Single induction hob ( the same one that @peachespeachespeaches linked earlier )
Oh my goodness ! The power and speed heating up of the hob is incredible , if I had to choose one out of the three , I’d choose the hob

I don't even have a proper oven hob combo any more.

I have a two ring hob, a small worktop oven, an air fryer and a remoska. For years I only used the remoska as our oven broke and we couldn't afford a replacement.

We turned ours off from late June - early December last year and survived with a combi micro oven, a large & small induction and a gas BBQ. Will do the same again this year but having had a smart meter installed I’m surprised that without hearing / water being on our Aga costs less than £1 per hour. It doesn’t feel as bad as I thought given that it warms up out north east facing kitchen, helps dry clothes etc.

I fry eggs in a toastie maker, as long as you don't mind triangular eggs.

OP

My carer has never had a conventional oven. When he moved in to his flat he had a plug in hob and a halogen oven.

When the halogen stopped working he got a toaster oven, I gave him a microwave and now he has an air fryer.

Pasta can be cooked by putting in a pan or dish and pouring over boiling water, leave for 10 mins and you have cooked pasta.

I have a rice cooker but only because I was buying a kettle and a toaster and Argos had a 3 for 2 offer on.

I do this every summer (Rayburn owner). We have a portable double induction hob, a combi microwave and a gas BBQ. Of those, the BBQ gets used the most - not for traditional burger-in-a-bun BBQ food, but for fish/chicken/vege kebabs/haloumi, served with salad kinda meals.

I love my instant pot, I do all my rice and pasta in there and it's great for curry. The model I have had a saute function so you can fry things in it. Between that, the microwave and the air fryer we don't have the oven on very often.

Oh yes, the sistema pasta/rice cooker is great. My student dd has one and has just made us buy one for our house while she's home over the summer!

I've got an instant pot (similar to ninja) and use it a lot - it sautes like a frying pan, pressure cook, slow cook. You can get lids that air fry for it too. Takes a while to get used to it but it's very handy.

I do everything from boiled eggs to curry to pot roast in mine. Pressure cooking works similar to boiling but it's faster, I'm sure you could do pasta in it.

That and a combo grill microwave would be fine. Just an instant pot would be enough really.

Depends how many you're cooking for, and what it is that you like to cook. As a family of four, we managed just fine with a good combi microwave and a plug in hotplate for a few years. Batch cooking cakes etc was fine, only awkward thing was a giant Turkey one Christmas. We took the legs off to make it fit, and cooked the body and legs separately. And it was fine. When we eventually redid the kitchen, I was so impressed with the combi microwave that rather than a conventional oven, we bought another combi microwave and built both of them in. You can cook rice and pasta in a microwave if you like - one of ours even has auto settings for that. The plug in hob that we bought is still in use now that we have a proper built in one, we use that in the garden alongside barbecues.

Another vote for a Ninja. It does all the things you mentioned and cooks rice, pasta etc. We rarely use our oven now: the ninja is used minimum 5 days a week.

We have an Aga, fortunately we also have a 2 ring induction hob, microwave & an electric oven. I keep the Aga permanently turned off, can’t afford it now. Cooking on 2 rings works fine for us, sometimes so juggling around but feasible.

We have the ninja 14 in 1 and only use the oven now for pizza/pasta bakes. That and a microwave/toaster would probably be enough. Off to Google the sistema rice cooker . . . .

Aga here too, it gets turned off in summer as the house gets too warm. I use an instant pot, air fryer, just swapped from an old tefal one to a dual zone ninja and a bbq. We got rid of the microwave years ago and haven’t felt the need to buy another.

It obviously depends on your space but by the time you pay for and store all the extra gadgets, can't you go for a simple 4 ring hob?

We had no kitchen for 8 weeks when we re-did it, it needed full guttering and all the jazz. We had a microwave, BBQ and a single induction hob. Doable but I was glad when I had my hob again.

I cooked a lot of curry and pasta sauces in advance and froze them so they could be reheated in the microwave and then added to the pasta/rice cooked on the induction hob. Or I cooked them first and kept hot while cooking the pasta/rice. Quite annoying I found.

An airfryer would have been useful.

In the exact same boat. Family of 4

I have a large 2 drawer air fryer and a plug in electric hob thing, electric kettle and toaster come out the cupboard. Oh and a combi microwave grill. We also have a gas bbq that DH cooks on a lot in the summer

I have the odd thing that I can’t cook easily, but otherwise it’s completely fine. The air fryer is awesome. I don’t really do slow cooked things in the summer. I do miss the aga for drying clothes though.