Miele DG 4082 Convection Steam Oven
16 July 2010
“Joseph and Joe’s Excellent Adventure”
It was supposed to be just a press conference for a product introduction by Miele, but it turned into something of an adventure, but all the bads became goods, and in the end, it actually ended well. This is how it went down.
Because of my many blogs on Miele, my website partner Joe Dusel and I were invited to a special event presentation sponsored by Miele. It was titled “Healthy Living Fare,” and we were to learn about a ground-breaking new study on environmental hazards in the home. Along with it they promised to serve a delicious healthy meal in their state-of-the-art Miele kitchen.
OK, this is how I look at food. Burgers are good. Beer is good. Fries are a staple. Put them all together, and you really have all the basic food groups represented, as long as there’s plenty of mayonnaise on the cheeseburger. But, as a long-time fan of Miele, I was most interested in whatever they would make in their kitchen, so Joe and I decided to give this a whirl.
In the two blogs that preceded this one I talked about our adventures after we got lost in Los Angeles. It happened because of distances, really. Those who organized the press conference were in New Jersey, and we are in the San Diego area. So when we got to the address we were given, there was no Miele. We called for better instructions and were told the meeting was actually to be held at the Miele showroom in Beverly Hills. At that point, not being familiar with the geography, we thought the same thing the New Jersey lady thought when she apologized for giving us the wrong address. Too far for us to go.
Well, as it turned out, we stumbled into Snaidero and Christopher Peacock Cabinetry. Thinking we would simply make the best of a bad situation, we entered both showrooms and were treated quite nicely by people most willing to have us write about them. In the course of that we mentioned our bad directions, and they told us that Miele was actually on that same street, about a mile south! Since we were there, though, we first got material for the two blogs that preceded this one.
We then drove down to Miele where they were still serving lunch from the steam oven, which was the whole point of the exercise. OK, I’ve already told you the kind of fare I really prefer, and if you’ve seen pictures of me, you know I’m not the kind of guy who misses too many meals. By now it’s 1:30, and I’m famished, not wasting away to nothingness (that process would surely take years!), but most definitely ready for some good chow.
After we identified ourselves, we received profuse apologies for the directions (hey, stuff happens!) and were seated at the kitchen island in the working Miele kitchen display. We were then served a lunch prepared just moments earlier from the Miele DG 4082 Convection Steam Oven. I look at this plate, and I see a small piece of fish and some asparagus shoots. Asparagus, I need to point out, is not on my list of the basic food groups, but by then I’m seriously contemplating eating the plate it came on!
OK, I’m having some fun with this, but I wanted to set this up for how it really pretty much went down for me, because the next part was pure ambrosia. Granted, they had a chef who did some nice things with a sauce for the Chilean Sea Bass, but what really gave it its flavor was the way it was cooked-in the steam oven. It was nice and firm the way fish is when it’s cooked to the peak of perfection, but not beyond, and succulent. It had retained all of its juices.
Well, Hungry Boy Yours Truly polished that fish off pretty quick, I can tell you, and all that was left was the asparagus. I am not kidding, that stuff was absolutely delicious, and I don’t even like asparagus. But, again, it came from that steam oven, so it started fresh and was then cooked the way it’s supposed to be, as opposed to being canned and boiled in a pan of some sort or however canned asparagus is cooked, because I’m telling you the truth, when I see it like that, I just push it to one side of my plate!
They also served a rice dish that was nice and fluffy and then topped it off with molten chocolate cakes for desert. But here’s the topper on this. Because they can do such things, and because they wanted to display the capabilities of their product, they cooked everything at the same time in the steam oven. There was absolutely no transfer of flavors. None. And that leads us to the last point I wanted to make on their ovens.
One of the things that makes the Miele DG 4082 special is that it is a convection steam oven, which means that there’s an immediate and intense exchange of heat that ensures that food is heated rapidly and is sealed instantly to retain all the vitamins, color and flavor. That sounds like sales copy until you taste what comes out of that oven. Then it sounds like gospel!
Miele bills their Convection Steam Oven as the sum of some very impressive parts, and it really is. I’ve already talked about the way the unit performs, so I’ll say nothing more now, except to point out that it uses a refillable water reservoir, so it does not need a direct plumbing line. And as for how it looks, well, disregard the dorky model (me!); the oven itself looks pretty slick though!
So, let’s review. Wrong directions yielded three blogs instead of one, and a famished blogger sampled things he would have passed on earlier and learned about the new flavors from an entire meal steamed in a matter of minutes. No salt, no grease, no muss, no fuss, and at the end, you just use a paper towel for the cleanup! All in all, an excellent adventure!
Joseph
Leave a Reply
3 Responses to “Miele DG 4082 Convection Steam Oven”
July 16th, 2010 at 9:30 AM
It was an excellent adventure Joseph. Thanks for driving!
I love getting to see these products close up and actually being demonstrated. Seeing appliances in a showroom is nice, but having the experts there to tell us the ins and outs of the products makes it just so much better.
Someday I want to have a kitchen full of Miele appliances!
Joe
July 16th, 2010 at 9:51 AM
Wow, that steam oven looks great. The fish is making me hungry! In Japan we steam cooked a lot when I was a kid, but not like that. It looks like you guys had too much fun.
Kat
August 19th, 2010 at 9:25 AM
[...] One of the things I most enjoy about this blog site is the freedom it gives me to occasionally expand our horizons a bit, which is what I will be doing today. A routine appliance like a vacuum cleaner really falls outside the parameters of what Joe and I established when we put this thing together, but I decided to write about it today for the simple reason that the Miele S7 Series is not an average vacuum cleaner. It’s like Las Vegas, I kid you not. But bear with me for a moment while I explain. I first saw the S7 Series a few weeks ago when Joe and I went to Los Angeles for a press conference, which ended up as “Joseph and Joe’s Excellent Adventure.” [...]