The Kitchen Gourmet Electric Buffet Range Single Burner: A Product Review

The Kitchen Gourmet Electric Buffet Range Single Burner is fundamentally an electric stovetop burner. Clocking in at a price of $10 (before tax) at Walgreens, it's a cheaper option for dorm/office cooking than even the cheapest of hot plates, the lowest of which are usually at least $20 or so. Of course, you don't get the surface area of a hot plate, and obviously can't cook directly on it, so you'll need some pots and pans as well.

Given the very low price, I felt the unit functioned quite adequately, and is actually capable of getting very hot in a short period of time. That brings up one of my major gripes about it, however - the heat settings are controlled by a knob with a marker that simply ranges from "Low" to "High", with no indication of the Celsius/Fahrenheit measurements of the current temperature. Even the "low" setting is pretty hot, which I learned the hard way the first time I used mine - I threw some bacon in a pan, set it to Medium and left the room for five minutes, and came back to find the bacon blackened and smoke pouring out of the pan. I used a thermometer with a saucepan of boiling water to mark off relative temperature settings on the knob to at least give me a rough idea of what temperature each setting is at.

There's two other significant problems with this product, and one of them is endemic to the whole range of budget Kitchen Gourmet cookware - the power cord is too damn short. It's barely about two feet long, and won't even come near reaching my ground-level outlets from a counter top. I have to use a short little $5 folding table with it (and with all my other Kitchen Gourmet stuff) to actually get it plugged in. I'd happily pay a couple extra bucks at retail to have these cords extended, they are just ridiculously short.

The final issue is that the actual range top - the metal portion that gets heated - can't seem to be installed perfectly level. It always seems to be a bit on a slant, so when you are heating a thin layer of oil in a pan for sauteing or frying, the oil tends to collect and pool at one side. I remedied this with a little piece of plastic wedged under one of the feet. Normally I'd say that and the temperature marking were too much jerry-rigging for any consumer product, but the thing is $10.

And that's ultimately what it all comes back to - the super-low price. It does what it is supposed to do and does it capably, at a price point that it's really hard to find anything comparable. The range top is easy to get in and out for cleaning and it doesn't produce any weird smells or smoke. The construction also seems reasonably solid, I'm not worried about it shattering to pieces if I accidentally drop it. I'm fairly pleased with it despite the little tics in the operation, for $10 I'm willing to do a reasonable bit of after-market tinkering.

It's probably also worth noting this item is only available in Walgreens stores, they don't have it for sale online through the web site at this time.