I have the Aarke machine but uses SodaStream canister, very happy too.
All of what you said is the reason we bought ours - to reduce our purchasing (and subsequent recycling) and many beverage cans and bottles. But the carbonization has been disappointing. Wish I had your experience with that.
I tried it but didn’t like the flavors but admit I’m kinda fussy.
We didn’t buy any of the flavors it comes with. We mix it with juice, lemonade, tbsp or so of various Torani syrups. Sometimes drink it as is, although I like my plain water flat and my fizzy water flavored generally.
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Good information, thank you. I’ve been tempted to buy one but not now.
I think I’ll copy you and go with toaster as well. Last year my old faithful of 20+ years toasted its last slice. I spent quite a few hours reviewing toasters on Amazon, Best Buy (a US appliance/electronics shop) and the like.
Most had decent reviews in the 4-star range but something I began noticing as I focused on the unhappy campers was that all of the toasters I reviewed, from cheap to quite expensive, had a too-high lemon rate. That is, while the majority of buyers were happy, something like 8-15 percent were 1-star reviews, nearly all complaining of the same types of problems: toasts unevenly and very slow.
So I bought the Black & Decker, which was the one with the 8% 1-star rate, hoping I’d be in the other 92%.
I wasn’t. Uneven and very slow, plus the bagel feature (supposed to toast only one side) barely makes any difference in all four slots - the side that’s supposed to be “off” (or certainly supposed to be a whole lot less) toasts the article, only slightly less than the “on” side.
I recently bought a meat slicer and noted a similar pattern while doing my research. For all brands no matter the cost, the 1-star reviews were (IIRC) 8-18% of reviewers. The most common complaints were that the backwall deforms with pressure (bends outward at the top) as you slice so you get slices that are thick top/thin bottom, and pressure on the backwall causing the thickness adjuster to release a bit mid-stroke, so that each successive slice gets thicker. Reading the complaints taught me a lot about how to use it, so it works well enough for my needs.
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Being a big fan of the rectangular electric skillet, I finally had to replace the one that I had after 10 years or so. I purchased a Bialetti ceramic one and oh, what a POS. Something was off with the contact of the heating element and the contact surface. After the first use, it was returned at BB& B and a Westbend was ordered. Been happy with the WB since.
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As a reciprocal of this topic, I have to say the Panasonic Flash Express toaster oven is the best toaster I have had. It toasts bread evenly and quickly, plus crisps up fries, leftover pizza, and many other foods in record time… plus it has a pretty small footprint for a toaster oven.
While it “feels” a little cheap, it has been a work horse, being used almost daily for years.
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I agree with most of these except for the Hamilton Beach egg and English muffin appliance.
I set up a egg, meat, cheese, English muffin assembly line and the boys cook their own breakfast and Breakfast for Mom and Dad.
what’s not to like about that?
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Come to think of it. My stainless steel soap maybe useless, but it is at least not dangerous. Considered all the Chowhound posts I remember, I am surprised that no one has listed explosive Pyrex glassware.
I tried to think really hard on this. Lucky, I don’t think I bought anything excessively dangerous.
Or just exploding glassware. We had a set of drinking glasses that tended to explode when gently clinked – poor annealing or something. After a few of those, we tossed the remainder.
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I read the explosive Pyrex thread on CH yet have not experienced that myself thankfully.
Same here. Most of my Pyrex is PYREX, the older version in the US which is made from borosilicate glass. I think BS glass is still prevalent in UK/EU but I’m not sure. The new branded pyrex (lowercase versus ALLCAPS for the older version) in the US is regular soda lime glass. The soda lime is supposedly less likely to chip or flake on impact than BS, but it can’t handle thermal shock at all, whereas BS is pretty resistant to thermal shock.
Unfortunately a couple of my newer pieces are Pyrex (soda lime) and the stuff I’ve bought for my daughters is also soda lime, so I’ve warned them to be certain any surface they’re transferring to is completely dry. And I showed them a video that some organization like Underwriters Laboratories put out showing how very different the behavior was as between the two types of glassware.
The mystery to me is the soda lime glassware shattering in the oven, in the midst of a cooking cycle - in these cases there was no sudden thermal shock. Maybe there were small, unseen cracks, or some kind of defect at manufacturing causing retained stress in the dish?
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That’s very interesting information thank you for posting.
I did notice that Pyrex in the red paper wrapper is thicker glass than the white paper wrapper which is the newer version.
I had to return to the store because you could see the defects in the glass with a crack on the corner inside the glass.
I was worried about pulling lasagna out of the oven and the glass shattering.
If I can’t find the red wrapper one then I will use a metal baking pan.
Welcome. The easy tell is that the original PYREX (BS glass) is nearly colorless while the tempered soda lime version has a green tinge, especially noticeable if you’re looking down at the rim of the dish, or the handle area edge-on.
I just read a NYT article that said “don’t worry about it, it’s rare” and also not to worry because the soda lime glass, being tempered, tends to break up into cubes not shards (still messy but, as they claim, not too dangerous). OTOH, I believe this might be the video I had the girls watch (turns out it was Consumer Reports, not UL), and there are certainly some large shards present in the dishes they thermally shocked to break.
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Thank you off to read.
Btw. It is the one with the green hue that is now made even thinner.
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Those look useful for many tasks.
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That’s at a time when things didn’t get prettied up and only useful for 1 task.
This was among one of my first purchases for my kitchen almost 40 years ago.
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I stand corrected. I have 3 regretful purchases.
A Heritage smokless grill needs to get added to my list.
First off, it steams the food (that’s not a bad thing if that is what you are looking to accomplish) and lightly colours whatever is on the grill.
Smokless? Yeah tell that to my smoke detector it did not get that memo. Lol !
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