The Tefal OptiGrill is one of the many Tefal products I’ve had the privilege of testing out, as a Tefal Innovation Panellist. The Tefal OptiGrill, was years in the making, as it’s quite a genius piece of kitchen kit! This review will talk about the original model and I will mention the most recent model (and where to buy it) towards the end of this post.
How to cook on the Tefal OptiGrill
Quite simply…
- You switch it on
- Select your meat/fish or manual mode for things like paninis
- Press OK
The Tefal OptiGrill then preheats itself to the correct temperature and bleeps to let you know when it’s ready.
4. You pop in your steak (or whatever you are cooking) and press OK.
Now here’s the clever bit…
The Tefal OptiGrill then measures the thickness and size of the piece of steak.
It sears it at a high temperature to lock in all the flavour, then it drops it’s own temperature to what it needs to be, to cook the steak.
When it reaches each phase of cooking (Rare/Medium/Well Done) it bleeps at you, to tell you to take the steak out.
There is also a large LED light which changes colour during the process.
Pink = Preheating
Blue = Searing
Yellow = Rare
Orange = Medium
Red = Well done
That’s it. It really is as simple as that. No more guesswork with steak preferences. No more needing to probe meat to check it’s done.
You don’t EVER have to adjust the temperature or tell the machine how many pieces of steak you’ve put in.
You never have to check it half way through cooking or cut into a steak to see how well it’s cooked.
Put quite simply… it just does it all for you.
And if you forget to turn it off after you’ve removed your steak… it’ll do that by itself too!
There are preset buttons for burgers, chicken, bacon, sausages, steak and fish.
For everything else (paninis, prawns etc) there’s a “Manual Mode” button.
There’s even a defrost button, so if you forgot to take your bacon out the freezer, you can defrost it in the OptiGrill too!
The OptiGrill’s plates are removable and dishwasher safe, as well as being non-stick.
I tried it myself with a small piece of Rump steak. I like my steak medium. The preheating took around 8 minutes. The cooking… took 3 minutes! When I got it out, it was literally perfect. Moist, tender, flavourful and most definitely Medium!
I personally think the Tefal OptiGrill is absolutely genius! Especially if you are entertaining guests – you can cook all their steaks at the same time – but still cook them to their liking! Also because I find it hard to cook steaks to the right preference anyway, and if steak is over-cooked… it’s ruined!
I also love salmon and this is a much quicker way of cooking it. If you have a weak spot for burgers and like to make your own (which often end up all different shapes and sizes), this will be great for cooking those too.
I’ve made a 30 second video of some brief snapshots of the Tefal OptiGrill in action! (please note they are only a snapshot – they are not sequenced in the correct order).
… Or if you want to see how it’s done, step by step, you can watch this much more professional video made by Tefal…
After publishing this post, we decided we fancied steak for dinner… so my 6 year old cooked it for us! It’s THAT easy!
***2019 UPDATE***
Six years on from publishing this post, my Tefal OptiGrill still gets used regularly. It’s still in brilliant condition, due to those easy clean, non-stick plates and it still works perfectly. This is a really fantastic product and well worth the cost. If you’d like to buy one yourself, please buy it through my affiliate link here. This means I will get a very small bonus for recommending the product, but it will not affect the price you pay.
There is now also the Tefal OptiGrill XL, which has 33% more grilling space and even more functions, including burgers, red meat, sandwich, sausage, fish, poultry, seafood, bacon and pork.
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