2 Chefs Test THE WONDERBAG: A Non-Electric Slow Cooker!

We're a group of mates who have your back on all things food, from cooking battles to gadget reviews and cookbook challenges, to a weeknight meal pack app, bake your eggs, we've discovered the tools that help us. They will help everyone cook and eat. smarter, join our community where everything we do starts with you. Now you know how much we love to see our friends Ben and James, who are real

chefs

, review some kitchen kit. Well, today we have something wonderful for them. It is a wonderful bag. essentially a non-

electric

slow

cooker

and I'm really excited about this, what about you guys?

I think this is really cool. I've heard a few things about it. I'm excited to try it. I'm excited to see if it works because how? You put something in a bag and it keeps it warm for 12 hours and it also has a really interesting backstory? Every day, more than 3.5 billion people cook over an open fire, endangering their health, causing widespread deforestation and burdening women with hours of unpaid work. Labor was needed to meet the demand for firewood, so Sarah Collins, a South African activist and businesswoman, invented the Wonder Bag. A non-

electric

slow

cooker

. Just one bag can reduce the amount of cooking fuel for a family by 70 and save five large trees.

From deforestation, this incredible product has helped improve the lives of many communities, particularly those in developing countries who live day to day with little or no electricity. He's obviously doing amazing things around the world. Open it. I'm hugely intrigued by this because I don't really understand how it works, what it feels like, what's inside, that stuff feels foamy, like insulation, it's funny, it doesn't look like a kitchen kit at all, it doesn't feel like you'd take it with you. bed. with you instead of the stove considering how big it is it's not heavy but I imagine it incredibly well insulated I still don't understand how it keeps things warm for so long, let's get started and cook the first lamb curry recipe, it's worth saying before to start. that the lamb recipe is designed specifically for the wonder bag, it will probably work very well, the other two that we came up with and we have no idea if they are going to work, they are a

test

, they are an experiment.

The recipe is from Wonderbag founder Sarah and is a Durban lamb curry. Let's start it on the plate. We're going to get the lamb chops to brown really well. The Wonder Bag should continue to cook for four or five hours at a time. it came off, I'm excited for this and it has bananas served with bananas right at the end. I like that this is one of those recipes that I have no idea what it's supposed to taste like, but the flavors excite me when I look. For them, one of my favorite parts of this recipe is that it's marked one out of ten in terms of difficulty, so screw this up guys, I'm making the other base flavors, so one onion, a lot of garlic, a lot of ginger fresh and a little chili all chopped and that will go into the pan with curry powder to sweat once the meat has browned.

I know this is about the wonder bag, but can I talk about myself for a minute? Why do you have hands? in your pocket I left the house early this morning before I left I harvested something I've grown for our curry home-grown chillies I can't stand the arrogance hand in my pocket my produce from seeds couldn't you have waited for them to grow a little first it's not about the size, it's about garlic, ginger, chili, everything in the pan with the curry powder according to Sarah, the last flavor that should go in the pan along with the wet, tomato and beans, a little water It's the bay leaf, what? you start with look what else bay leaves are harvested oh they are so sweaty i have everything in ben's chili's and the bay leaf is next the lamb goes to the tomatoes goes to the beans go pour in some water and that's all a 1 out of 10 recipe in terms of ease, heat it up to a boil and I guess you want to super heat it all the way through so that it has the maximum chance of staying hot for four to five hours in this thing, put the lid on it.

I'm excited about this, so I show it in a different way, so it looks like two proud parents tucking their kids into bed. I can't imagine how, yes, but I'm sure it's hot there, but how does it stay that way. I suppose now we would throw that pan in the oven at 150 degrees Celsius or something for two or three hours, yes a couple of hours with lamb, with this you don't need electricity or additional heat, which is surprising and confusing, and I hope so be. works really well, so we'll set it aside in the studio for four or five hours and move on to recipe two.

The next recipe is Chili Sticky Beef Ribs, super simple, one out of ten, this might actually be one of the best. out of ten I have eaten this before because this is what we made for my personal maid five six years ago. It is a gastronomic experience of ten out of ten. It involves cooking more meat on the bone, so it has great flavor, but needs a short whip of meat. long slow cook, we also chose a cast iron skillet that you think might retain more heat and we have another wonderful bag, look at that pretty design, this recipe is so easy we'll have to adapt it a little. a little bit actually because what we do in the recipe is marinate the beef ribs in soy sauce, star anise, chili, ginger, garlic and brown sugar and then when we want to cook it, we just add water, put it directly in the oven, so let's go.

What you have to do is throw everything in the pan and then just bring it up to temperature, put it in the wonderful bag so you don't burn the meat at all, not in this restaurant because with all the soy and sugar and then all the aromas. and the star niche you get so much flavor plus slow cooking the meat that we don't even bother to sear it, that doesn't mean you can't sear it, you definitely can sear it, but to keep it simple, this is great, it takes work because it's ribs of beef and if we can't eat them, I don't want to waste short beef roots.

I guess what I'm thinking is if this is going to go in the oven, then it would go back in the oven for like two three hours maybe more at a very low temperature, but it would still kind of bubble up a little bit in the oven, would it? you know what I mean? I just can't see how this is going to bubble up, it's just going to stay hot, so are the ribs really going to be cooked compared to the lamb chops which will definitely be cooked because you can cook them quickly too? No, no, you could try to make it look like it bends there, that was a little tricky.

Pretty heavy, it's cast iron full of meat, like me, you know, we always like to mix things up, so we're going to make it sweet. This is a chai and white chocolate rice pudding. You can't ask him to cook two and it's on him. original recipe, a baked rice pudding, so you start and then you put it in the oven, you bake it so that it gets a deliberate skin and it's amazing, obviously we're not going to bake here, but in theory, the absorption of the same amounts it should work. very easy, all the wet ingredients go into the pan, so that's the milk, cream, sugar, chai tea bags and vanilla bean paste.

Once our dairy has infused, we'll take out the chai bags and add rice, nutmeg, and diced white chocolate. When I first heard about the Wonder bag, I instantly thought of times in my life where I could use it, like camping and picnics and cooler bags for things like that, but it's only when you start reading about the difference they make. I realize how important it is for my friend to be called privilege because we're trying it out because it might be good for us to use it somewhere in our lives, like yeah, when we go camping or something, it's not something we that we should trust.

Every day, what is the job that they do so amazingly, which is amazing, when I go camping, one of my favorite jobs is collecting firewood, but you realize that it's actually the women and children who are disproportionately disadvantaged, sometimes as many as four. hours of collecting firewood, stoking the fire to keep them lit, which will just stay there for four hours, if you don't need to burn the wood, you don't need to keep the fire going, so yes, the amount of fuel is huge in terms of savings, but also the health benefits of not sitting by an open fire, yes, I haven't even considered that, so you save three or four hours a day collecting firewood to stoke the fire and scrubbing pots that They have been on the fire for 45 hours over the course of a year, that is 1,300 hours saved that can be used for education and skill improvement smallest wonder bag small amount of rice that we will leave, I don't know, I would give it 90 minutes in the oven , but let's leave it for a while and see where it goes I think we left it all the time we have three dishes they look fantastic they all spent six hours in the wonderful bag while we did other things and when I opened it they were all still hot a good temperature to eat, no on cooking at the time, but a good temperature to eat, shall we start with Sarah's lamb curry?

Yes, we dig deep, so we look for a thick sauce to cover the beans, we look for beautifully cooked lamb and all that. flavors like just getting to know each other a little applause applause that's far from dry that's delicious oh wow your fears have been eliminated that's perfect isn't it? That's great absolutely perfect this is me stepping out of my comfort zone lamb and banana why not? I really like it, it really works, should we try the second one? Okay, ribs, I guess we should say right up front that we were pretty bold in choosing the recipe here because we chose probably the largest piece of meat with the biggest bone to cook with.

In this way, it is a proper

test

, isn't it? Yes, it's not done. It actually looks very attractive but it looks amazing but it's not what you expect from beef ribs and we usually cook them for about the same period of time but continuously and you want it to melt in your mouth , we pushed the jar to see what would happen, it didn't work, I mean I'm just going to try it, I mean it's a finish, so oh, great recipe, the flavors are amazing, I would look And I say failure, wrong recipe choice, Wrong choice of meat, but still delicious.

I think the key here is 50 cook and then 50 groovy bag, so you're still halving your fuel use or cutting the meat like they suggest in the recipe book. We should stop trying to push the boundaries, definitely cut the cut of meat if that's a failure, that's the failure of flavor. I think we've ever done it well, well done, thank you, thank you, it's brilliant, delicious, the third dessert, this excites me, so remember. me again rice pudding chai that takes me back to being four five six years old again it's like rice pudding it just takes me back to being a child except it has the elegance of chai and white chocolate I love that warmth of chai me love it worked well, I'll call it two and a half out of three, oh yeah, biggest lesson learned, listen to the pros and stick with the lamb dish now obviously none of this is a hashtag ad, we would have told you that from the beginning, but since Buying the Wonder Bags ourselves and trying them out, we've been talking to Sarah, who is the founder, and she actually offered to donate a thousand Wonder Bags and 400 Wonder Masks to help with Covid to the communities that need it the most. they need and do it in an orderly manner. name, which is incredible, but we don't want to leave it there.

We would love to see if Sorted as a community can match or beat Sarah's donation, so there is a link in the description box below, if you click on it it will take you We invite you to the Wonderbag website where you can donate, donate what you can if you can afford it. Every Wonderbag that is donated will go to help communities that really need it. If you can donate, be sure to comment with love from Sorted and us. We'll be able to compile it all, see how much we can do as a community, and we'll keep you updated on the progress.

Thanks in advance. Can we continue eating this delicious failure? Yes, perfect, the Pax app is just one of the tools out there. Used as part of the Ranked Club, members also discover and share restaurant recommendations using the Eat app, listen to and contribute to our Feast Your Ears podcast, and give us inspiration for new cookbooks received throughout the year. Everything is included so check out the membership sorted by heading to points club sorted and now a mistake oh oh sure it's like we're both thinking ahead and yeah you're going with yours we've both folded a cloth simultaneously because you have to put it at the bottom we both read the instructions