Mumsnet users review the Tefal Cook4Me Connect

[JustineBMumsnet]

This is the feedback thread for the 30 Mumsnetters who have been testing the Tefal one-pot digital cooker Cook4Me Connect (RRP £319.99).

Here’s what Tefal have to say about the product: “You don’t need to be a masterchef to achieve delicious meals in no time! Tefal have innovated again, and now give you Cook4Me.

Cook4Me is a one-pot digital cooker, ideal for parents looking to make fast and fresh meals:
- It is easy to use and intuitive: Cook4Me comes with 50 built-in recipes, and features a digital screen with guided cooking steps.
- Cook4Me cooks under pressure, which means you will save a lot of time. For example, after browning and pre-heating, it cooks a Chicken Tikka Masala in 3 minutes, a Thai Green Chicken curry in 4 minutes and a Risotto in 9 minutes (and no need to stir!)…
- It is the ideal all-in-one cooker, with up to 6 cooking manual modes: not only does it pressure cook, but it also steams, browns, simmers, gentle-cooks and automatically keeps your food warm. Its dishwasher-safe bowl can feed 6 people, perfect for the whole family or for batch-cooking.

Cook4Me comes in a standard version, with 50 built-in recipes (RRP is £269.99), and in a Connected version, that works with My Cook4Me app, giving access to over 100 recipes (RRP is £319.99).”

Testers, please ensure that you’ve tested the digital cooker using both the recipes and the manual/ingredients modes and then give your feedback by answering the following questions as well as completing the survey we will email to you.

1. How easy or difficult did you find Cook4Me Connect to use?
2. Which recipes did you try? What did you think of them?
3. What were your thoughts on the cooking results of the Cook4Me Connect?
4. Would you recommend the Cook4Me Connect?

All who give their required feedback will be entered into a prize draw where one tester will win a £100 voucher for the store of their choice (from a list).

Non-testers, please answer the below question. All non-testers who answer the below question will be entered into a prize draw where one MNer will win a £200 voucher for the store of their choice (from a list).

• Is there a recipe you’ve never dared to cook and would really like to be able to make in the Cook4Me?

Thanks and good luck!

MNHQ

Standard Insight T&Cs apply

Non tester i would love to cook a good butter chicken curry but i am not very brave and sadly did not get picked for this trial.i hope to get a cook 4 me cooker in the future and have a go at some new dishes.im sure my children would like to try nrw things as i tend to stick to the same dishes.

Can't find the stupid video now

Tester - I used mine for the first time today.

It was easy to set up and link with the app. I had a quick look through the recipes and made a mental note of all the ones I want to try.

Today we had chicken tikka masala. I love curries and like lots of flavour and don't really want to rely on jars so I made a couple of changes. I added ginger and garlic and fresh tomato instead of purée. Plus I only used half the paste stated. (Next time, I'll just add dry spices.)
It was really quick and tasted great. I also cooked it fairly early and left it on the keep warm setting til dh and I were ready to eat.

I'm going to try making houmous tomorrow.

I also want to try some puddings but would like to do one large one rather than 4 small ones. I shall look into this and hopefully have a go.

1. How easy or difficult did you find Cook4Me Connect to use?

It's exceptionally easy to use, but it does take the joy out of cooking, it's mostly an assembly job.

1. Which recipes did you try? What did you think of them?

Vegetable pasta, pretty good, a ore programmed recipes. Korma, my own recipe, on the manual mode. Also pretty good. It's quick, and cooks in one pot and there are endless options.

1. What were your thoughts on the cooking results of the Cook4Me Connect?

The cooing results were great. The preprogrammed recipes come out slightly better, I had to cook it twice on he manual setting.

1. Would you recommend the Cook4Me Connect

Yes, but it's very expensive, and could do with more recipes. It doesn't have a lot.

I was shocked at how well the pasta came out. I added peas, carrots, onion, and seasonings to pasta and some stock. Five minutes later, a full on meal.
Take a look at my picture. It was eaten by a fussy child, and three adults, eight two portions leftover.

A lot of the recipes rely on jars, which I dislike. But it is easy enough to alter em, but it does sort of ruin the ideology of he machine as it lengthens the process somewhat!

hmm not a meal I wouldn't try, don't get the 'not brave enough' thing... but saying that I probably just wouldn't be brave enough to cook in this, seems faff/hit and miss/takes away the opportunity for educated amendments (taste/consistency) you can see need to be made as cooking

There seem to be quite a few cheesecake for pressure cooker recipes around. I'll definitely try that.

I made whole chicken with bacon, leek and mushroom tonight.
The prep was a bit faffy (browning a whole chicken is hard!) and the sauce at the end was very liquid (this seems to be a theme doesn't it? I guess it's the downside of pressure cookers?) but it was absolutely delicious. I ended up syphoning off half of the liquid, thickening what was left with cornflour and creme fraiche then stirring in pasta and some of the chicken to make a really delicious pasta dish. The rest of the chicken I have saved for salads for lunch tomorrow.

Non tester

I'm quite a creative cook so can't think of a dish I haven't dared to try but, as my oven hasn't been working for months, I've really missed making dishes like Boeuf Bourguignon, Boston Casserole, steak pie filling and things like pulled beef, paella, coq au vin.

Using a bargain air fryer, a stove top and some tweaking, I manage to produce most of the food I enjoy cooking but you just can't beat the tenderness of low 'n' slow dishes, and it seems the Tefal Cook4Me Connect could replicate the juicy tenderness of oven cooking but in a fraction of the time, and with a lot less fuss and faff.

Like Iambubbles86 and, I'd guess, many other non-testers, if lucky enough to win I'd be considering the Tefal Cook4Me Connect, too. I love the design, and it looks pretty substantial, bigger than I first thought. Loving hearing how everyone's getting on and JamesDelayneysTattoos and Shelagh Turner , you had me in stitches

As a child, I always loved it when braised steak was on the menu, made with Guinness. I would love to be able to make it and offer it to my family now as a little comfort food that always made me feel good.

How easy is it to use? - if you read the instructions it's very easy. If you're a bit of a dyslexic man like me ( I'm not really a man ) and don't read the instructions properly then you can get tangled up and end up accidentally using it in the manual mode 😂. Got there in the end.

Which recipes did you try? - pea and mint risotto, meatballs in tomato sauce, made up chicken tikka masala, chilli, veg pasta. As others have said I've been finding the sauces a bit runny for my liking so thickened at the end. I'm looking forward to trying Greek lamb tomorrow. I think an onion soup would work well as that normally takes ages on the hob. I'm also looking forward to making something sweet. I might do that too tomorrow

What do you think of the cooking results ? - most of the things so far I've had to tweak, risotto was tad too dry, other sauces too thin but nothing major. The meaty dishes were cooked well and I wasn't worried about them being undercooked.

Would you recommend it? - I've already recommended it to about 3 people although it's very expensive.

Tester- tried beef Madras tonight. Again it uses curry paste which I wouldn't usually, and tomato purée. However the meat came out very tender, absolutely beautiful. The sauce was a bit sweet for me (maybe the apple in it?) so I would swap the apple for a veg next time. The paste, well I will use it again as I have some left, and the taste was good considering speed of this as a weeknight meal, but I also plan to try my usual beef curry recipes on Manual to see how they work.

Not sure what to try next. Risotto- maybe.

Oh and curry sauce wasn't too runny...

I used the steam basket this evening for green beans and long stem broccoli.

I checked the timings which read 3 minutes but forgot to factor the warming/heating session so it was more like 7 minutes which threw my timings out.

It would be better if the heating session happened before the instructions started and I think that would help with the issues mentioned above with over cooking at the browning stage.

They were cooked perfectly though and cleaning the pot is very easy.

I'm on the instant pot UK community FB page and there is a post about pulled pork which I'm going to try. I've done PP in the slow cooker before and then made up pulled pork rolls, froze them and taken them to work - quick blast in the microwave to heat up at lunch time, makes a change from salad and soup.

non-tester here. Someone's mentioned they're making creme brulee! MMMM... Its my favourite desert but have never tried to make it myself. Would love to!

Tester -
This is my first week back at work after maternity and the machine only arrived yesterday!

Our kitchen is tiny, so the machine is currently taking over. I don't think we will be able to store it though so it's staying out.

Tonight I cooked the risotto. Initially I planned to cook it for dh and I, but the app has auto selected we have six people - so now we have risotto in Chinese tubs for lunch!
It was nice. I couldn't get to it straight away once it had finished because I was feeding the baby. But I thought it worked well. Dh thought it was lumpy.

Planning to cook ratatouille tomorrow. And may get dh to do the spag Bol or chilli.

Non tester: so many recipes id love to try. If I had to pick one I'd say moussaka just to see what the fuss is about.

Made the bacon and leek risotto tonight and even Miss Fussy McFussyPants said it was nice. I do make risotto but it is a labour intensive faff for what is, on paper at least, a simple meal so I was impressed at being able to put the stock in and bog off for 10 minutes. Far preferable to standing and stirring for half an hour. I was quite sceptical about whether it would be cooked properly but it was. I made more than we needed and took some to Ma and Pa and they loved it too.

However.....as much as I like it and I am impressed with the speed I still cannot find a way to justify the price. It doesnt do enough to be worth £320 rrp for me, especially when there are relatively few pre programmed recipes and of those quite a few are based on shop bought sauces. If I was making spag bol with a jar then I could do it in roughly the same amount of time in a pan on the hob, so why would I spend £300+ on a gadget that does exactly the same thing?

One of the advantages it has for me so far is that I can put something on to cook and then go and do something else without having to worry about it getting burnt. I'm totally disorganised and prone to put dinner on to cook, then wind up giving DD2 a bath or something and forgetting about it. This allows me to get sidetracked and it just switches over to keep warm and it's perfect for when I actually remember it's there!

Clearly most normal people aren't such eejits as I am though!

Non-tester
A soufflé is a distant dream at the moment!

Non tester. Iam scared of making curry so I'd love to do it in a pressure cooker to make it easier.

Tester - feedback no. 2 whilst I remember!
Last night I tried the lamb rogan josh and it created a new issue that I wanted to feedback on...
I prepped the ingredients, waited for the pre-heating, added onion and meat to brown, then added tons and jar to start it cooking with the lid on. It beeped about 30 secs in to cooking and said 'error 21' which eventually I found out means not enough liquid. Fair enough, I had put in slightly more meat because of the packet weights. However, there was no errror managing via the cooker or via the app, I had to dig out the manual to find out what to do. It told me to add 50-100ml water and then start the recipe again. What??? That meant it went through the preheating again, the browning again etc before I could close the lid at the stage I had got to before. Surely we should be able to override that and jump to the right stage? I was worried it was all going to burn or at least burn off the extra water!
The end result was absolutely delicious, though. A huge winner with all the family and I will definitely do it again.

Other note - it is a bulky piece of kit and I hadn't appreciated how shallow our worksurfaces are compared to the height of our wall cupboards which means I have to balance it precariously close to the edge when I am lifting the bowl in and out.

Also, I can't work out what the instructions are for that extra bit of metal with the veg steamer. Can anyone help?!

I have searched and I dont think that there are any Regular. I assume it is for veggies or rice but I wouldnt like to try it without proper instructions.

Isn't that bit of metal just a handle for the steamer basket?

My apologies, misunderstood. I have put it on the bottom of the steamer basket as a stand, at least thats what the instructions seemed to indicate I should do!