So, after years of travelling, you’ve picked up the best recipes from all over the world and have a penchant for unusual dishes and ingredients. The challenge isn’t so much what to cook, it’s how to keep everything you cook in top condition for when you get round to eating it.
The fridge freezer is, of course, the standard solution to storing food. As any trip to Curry’s (or you could always check out the full range of fridge freezers online), will show you, however, there’s quite a range of options when it comes to fridge freezers, so how to pick the perfect one?
The first thing to consider is how much space you have in your kitchen. American style fridge freezers are becoming increasingly popular in the UK and the major manufacturer on the Europe side of the pond is LG. They do, however, take up a lot of space, weigh a lot more, and are a lot less energy efficient.
The flip side is most produce cool, filtered water on command, have a huge amount of storage space – probably 40% more than your average upright fridge freezer, and usually have an ice dispenser.
Still, unless you really want the extra features, the extra £400 or £500 that you could spend on a top class American-style fridge freezer probably put them out of most people’s price bracket, to say nothing of the fact that your average English kitchen just isn’t large enough to accommodate one of these behemoths. Like a long pink Cadillac on a cramped English country road some of America’s most iconic products just look out of place away from the States. So what of the more traditional style offerings?
One thing to consider is their capacity, if all else fails, opt for a fridge freezer that has great capacity – you can store more things in it and need to go to the shops less regularly.
That said, the bigger the capacity the more energy the freezer compartment is likely to use, whatever size you go for make sure you have a look at the energy efficiency rating of each one. By law they have to advertise their energy efficiency rating, and it’s surprising how much you’ll spend in energy if you pick a fridge freezer with a low rating.Another thing to consider is noise, most fridge freezers should advertise how much noise they make, and a noisy appliance can be an enormous pain. Make sure you check the decibel rating.
Make sure you go for one with a frost free system, it comes as standard on most modern appliances and you shouldn’t have to pay too much more for it.
Last of all, you should always consider price, so take a look at comparison and review websites like Kelkoo (where the Beko CDA543FW, with solid functionality, frost free freezing and well designed use of space, emerges as a well regarded budget choice) to make sure you get the right choice and the right price.
