Product Test: roasting a chicken in half the time

LG's SolarCube oven, which uses a combination of steam, microwave and convection technologies, claims it can halve your roasting times. We put it to the test.

We can't let a claim like that go untested, now, can we?

LG has had its combination ovens on the market for a couple of years now. The one we tested is on the lower end of the range — LG claims that other models can roast a chicken in half an hour — but the one we tested, the Steam SolarCube MP-9289VSD (AU$999), allowed us to cook a chicken in 45 minutes.

Generally, a chicken of the size used in this test (15) takes around an hour and 20 minutes to roast, give or take. Following the auto-cook instructions in LG's manual, we were able halve that time, but the results weren't as good as we usually achieve from a conventional oven. We concluded that the oven can cook well, but requires a little experimentation to figure out the best way to cook things; next time, we'd leave out flipping the bird over, as advised in the instruction book, and give it a bit less time to avoid the dryness that we got in the chicken's legs and wings.

Yes, we really did use that much butter.