Our little piece of the world is a 1993 Ross North built project home in the south-eastern suburbs of Perth. The original Westinghouse appliances are very long in the tooth and much in need of replacement, so my lovely wife cajoled me into attending a V-ZUG cooking demo on Saturday "just to see how a steam oven works" with the very attractive bait of "free gourmet food!" thrown in for good measure. So it's now Monday, I know a heap more about steam ovens that I ever wanted to ... and I'm $10k poorer. Free food my foot!
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
We did some concentrated last-minute research and made our decision in a hurry, which let us catch the last day of a very attractive deal ... buy the combination steam/convection oven and conventional oven at 15% off RRP and get both an induction cooktop of our choice for $1 and free 5 year extended warranty on the lot. Added a microwave to that so it all matches, plus the GourmetSteam cookbook and an extra baking tray to replace the oven rotisserie when it's not in use, and it came to a grand total of $10,080. So this is what we've ordered through Kitchen HQ in Osborne Park:
V-ZUG Combi-Steam XSL combination steam/convection oven
V-ZUG Combair SL conventional oven
V-ZUG Miwell SL microwave
V-ZUG Induction hob with faceted glass edge
All in the black glass finish; not the stainless shown on V-ZUG's website. The photo below is where it's all going ... will need to replace the stained timber trim around the enclosure with something a bit more modern; benchtops, cupboards, tiles etc are unfortunately what we're stuck with for the next couple of decades though. Not that they're terrible - just not what I'd have of choice. The microwave will go at the bottom with the conventional oven and steam oven stacked above.
As the combination steam oven was the 'major' purchase around which everything else swung, we concentrated our research on that. Had a look at Good Guys and Harvey Norman and were completely unimpressed with everything we saw there. Birco, Blanco, Ilve, Bosch, Smeg, NEFF, Sharp ... they were all just too small. They typically had the water jug on the right hand side of the oven enclosure, which impacted severely on the width of the oven space. Most of these were around 35L capacity, but some were down around the 23L mark. Even some of the premium brands like Siemens only had products in this size. The steam function in some others was just a sponge that sat at the base of the oven with a rotating circular screen above to control the rate at which the steam entered the cavity ... figured we may as well sit a wet sponge in the base of our existing oven as go down that route.
Moving towards the 'higher' end we looked at AEG, Miele and V-ZUG. I'm not a fan of AEG based on the performance of some of their products that I've witnessed, and wasn't impressed with the quality of the MaxiKlasse 26 ProCombi that we looked at. It did have a huge oven area at 74L but I was too turned off by the plasticy nature of it to want to go down that road. Didn't spend much time looking at it at all.
It was the V-ZUG Combi-Steam XSL and the Miele 5080 XL that really had us scratching our heads. Both look to be brilliant products, with the Miele having an edge in my mind because it allows you to create up to 20 custom user programs that link together various cycles - eg you can set one up to defrost for an hour, then cook at 180*C and 30% steam for 1.5 hours, then dry cook for 1 hour. That's pretty funky and is something we would have loved, and unfortunately despite the V-ZUG having the physical capability to do all of that, the programmers have been a bit lazy and not included that functionality.
The big 'cons' for me with respect to the Miele though were (1) the price, as the equivalent package in Miele would have cost $15k+ compared to the V-ZUG at $10k on special; (2) the looks - didn't really like the Miele fascias much and (3) the motorized fascia on the steam oven that provides access to the water jugs beneath. It sounded gnarly when operating on the demo install, and just looked like trouble waiting for a time to happen. Found a review on the web where a person had their oven replaced once and fixed three times for exactly that issue - problems with the motorized fascia. Would have been much more sensible to have a nice smooth manual hinge action IMO.
So all things considered, we ended up with the V-ZUG Combi-Steam XSL as the best compromise for our needs. 51L internal volume; water tank integrated into fascia; attractive finish; and loads of features. Will update once it arrives and I get it all installed!
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
With the other appliances, we went for the upper end conventional oven sans pyrolitic ... couldn't justify $1400 extra just to make cleaning the oven easier. Has rotisserie, meat thermometer, auto cooking modes and all the jazz you could want in a tricked up conventional oven.
The V-ZUG hob range is pretty limited and is induction only, and with our existing bench cut-out we only had one size option available. Our choices within that were either flush mount, stainless edge trim or bevelled glass edge. Flush mount is impractical with laminate benchtops as a hot pan pushing off the glass onto the laminate would cause damage to the benchtop; stainless edge trim is annoying to clean; so bevelled edge was the decision, and we'll just have to be very careful about not chipping the edges.
There were two choices of microwave - standard with grill, or convection with grill. We figured that two ovens was quite enough oven room, so just got the standard. Quartz grill is a nice addition though ... keeps cleaning to a minimum if just doing cheese on toast or similar.