The GE Horizontal Rotisserie Oven: A Review
We decided to act, figuring the oven would eventually pay for itself when you considered how much the local grocery store was charging for their chicken. But, instead of dialing up the 1-800 number of the machine advertised on television, we decided to do a little checking first. Which was a good thing, because we found that we could buy a cheaper oven and wouldn’t have to pay for shipping. We in fact, discovered our oven at the local Walmart.
The GE Horizontal Rotisserie oven is very much what it sounds like. It’s an oven that sits on your counter and has gears on one side that cause a spit to turn. In the case of the GE oven, you actually get two spits, though one is much more like a basket.
The first spit is shaped like a rod that goes left to right. It’s got hooks on both ends, which come off to allow you to skewer a whole chicken or small turkey with the rod. Once you’ve got the spit all the way through the bird, you replace the other hook, slip the whole works into the oven, making sure to seat the gear on the spit with the gear on the inside wall of the oven and set the timer, which is situated on one side of the oven. The heat goes on when the timer is set. There is only one setting. As the bird cooks, it slowly rotates, causing most of the drippings to remain on and in the bird, instead of falling to the floor of the oven. And because of the big window on the front of the oven, you can watch your birds cook. The timer goes up to three hours, but it’s doubtful you’d ever have to cook anything that long. In fact, the chart that comes with the owner’s manual shows that most poultry takes only about twenty minutes per pound, and after cooking several chickens, and game hens, we can testify that this is absolutely correctly. We can also testify that the chickens we’ve cooked in this oven taste better than that which we’ve found at the grocery store. We were in fact, very impressed with the tenderness, juiciness and flavor of the chicken and are very delighted with the outcome of every bird we’ve cooked.
In addition to the skewer spit, there is a food basket that you can slip into the oven, and it too has a gear so that whatever you put in the basket, gets twirled as it cooks. We’ve found this to be a very handy little gadget. In addition to cooking steaks, or small roasts, we’ve found that we can also cook vegetables, including corn-on-the cob. Because it rotates, the natural juices (or the butter or sauce you put on it) stay on the thing you’re cooking instead of falling to the floor of the oven. Thus, it’s like a self-basting oven.
The oven comes with two other parts that can be removed for cleaning. The first is the tray that sits at the bottom of the oven. It’s basically a cookie sheet with high edges. Not only does the tray serve as a means of catching the drippings so they don’t become forever stuck to the bottom of your oven, but you can set the tray on the stove top and use it to make gravy from the drippings from your steaks or bird.
The other removable part that comes with the oven is the heat reflector. This is a thin piece of bent sheet metal that sits behind the electric heating elements inside the oven. Their purpose, as the name implies, is to reflect heat from the back of the oven, back towards the food that is cooking. The reason it’s removable is because some foods tend to spit a little when popping under the heat. The heat reflector catches most of that detritus.
We’ve found that cleanup for this oven is about as easy as an oven can be. The rotisserie spit and the basket all go right into the dish washer, as does the tray that catches the drippings and the heat reflector. We didn’t scrub anything. Due to the short cooking times, nothing gets cooked onto the spits or heat shields and thus come off rather easily.
The GE Horizontal Rotisserie is big enough to hold two birds side by side, while it cooks, which is in general, enough to feed four people. In addition to chicken and other fowl, the oven can be used to cook, pork, ham, hot dogs, beef roasts, lamb and baked potatoes. The basket can be used to cook anything you’d like to try. Mostly, we’ve found it works well with large type vegetables.
In short, we’ve been impressed with the GE Horizontal Rotisserie from the outset. It’s cooked everything almost exactly as advertised and is easy to use and clean. For our money, this oven has been a bargain.
If you are considering a rotisserie oven, we heartily recommend the GE Horizontal Rotisserie oven. Enjoy.
