Kambrook’s latest kitchen gadget is cute and functional, as long as you only want one sandwich at a time.
Every once in a while, a kitchen gadget crosses onto the reviews desk here at Fat Duck Tech. We’ve previously looked at everything from Breville’s excellent but pricey Smart Grill Pro to DeLonghi’s Dedica EC 680 Coffee Machine to Kambrook’s Pressure Express KPR800 Digital Pressure Cooker and Blitz2Go drink system. Like many kitchen gadgets, the Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich maker sells itself on the ease of use with which you can make muffin-style “sandwiches” — but what’s the reality like?
Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker: On the plus side
Any decent kitchen gadget has to sell itself on the proposition that it makes kitchen tasks easier or quicker, preferably both. On this score the Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker scores quite well. It’s essentially a single-serve grouping of hot plates and egg rings designed to sit around a muffin body and whatever fillings you have to hand to heat up within them, once it’s reached sufficient temperature.
Also for lunch.
It’s well built, with a finish that should be quite durable, although Kambrook’s instructions state that you should only use the Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker with plastic utensils.
Building your “sandwich” (which seems to me to be a very American term, but that’s a linguistic quibble) involves dropping two halves of a muffin into the top and bottom of the Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker, along with ingredients. There’s a hotplate attachment for cooking an egg that slides out to allow the egg to drop down onto the muffin before you remove it. It’ll also neatly melt cheese and heat up any pre-cooked deli meats you might have handy — sort of. More on that shortly.
Many kitchen gadgets suffer because they’re overly large and/or hard to clean, and here the Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker again scores well, because being single-serve it’s quite small, and its core cleaning surfaces are easy to remove and wash at will. If my own experiences are anything to go by, you’ll need to do so fairly regularly.
The end result of any kitchen gadget should be a yummy comestible, and the Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker didn’t essentially disappoint, with an egg, ham and salami “sandwich” for lunch. Yum, in other words.
Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker: On the minus side
Not quite everything is perfect in Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker world, however. Quite obviously, it’s a single serve device, and as such if you’re preparing a snack for the family you’ll be dropping ingredients into it for some time to get everyone fed. Equally, while it’s compact, it does get quite hot during heating/cooking, so it pays to be careful.
The drop-down slider for eggs works as advertised, but if you’re toasting a muffin above it you’ve got little guidance for how well cooked your egg actually is. Once you’ve dropped the plate, there’s no going back, aside from perhaps gently microwaving the result to finish the cooking cycle. That shouldn’t be the point of a kitchen gadget, however.
Finally, there’s a few things that you might think of on a muffin-style “sandwich” that the Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker can’t deal with itself. Specifically, bacon, sausage meat or burgers aren’t part of its forte, because it’s primarily a toasting/heating device. If you want those things in your sandwich, you’ll have to cook them somewhere else — which again detracts from the “easy” part of the Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker.
In some ways — and this is getting into wishlist territory — it’s a pity that the Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker doesn’t have stronger heating elements. The design suggests that you could simply prepare killer burgers on it, for example, but with its gentle heating, it would take forever and/or risk some nasty food poisoning if you were to try.
Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker: Pricing
The RRP of the Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker is $49.95 in Australia.
Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker: Fat Duck Verdict
Like most kitchen gadgets, the Kambrook Stack & Snack Sandwich Maker isn’t an absolutely vital kitchen tool. It’s a fun gadget with a very specific purpose in mind at a price point that’s quite reasonable given that purpose. It’s not likely to suit you if you have a larger family to feed, and for that a larger sandwich press would be a much better buy. For those with smaller kitchens looking for a solo snack maker, it’s a decent little gadget at a fair asking price as long as you eat a lot of muffin-style “sandwiches”.