Went to a Wolf SubZero product demo last night

14 years ago

It was a much softer sell than I was anticipating. All cooking was done on the wall ovens, the induction cooktop, the electric grill module and the deep-fryer module. The steamer module and the electric cooktop were demo'd but not used for the meal. The food was surprisingly hearty - DH said they'd blow us off with something easy/fast like fajitas, but we had pizzas, dumplings and short ribs for appetizers; broiled salmon, pork loin, roasted root vegetables and roasted potatoes and mushrooms for the entree; chocolate fondue and chocolate-chip cookies for dessert. Oh, and wine!

The chef highly praised the electric wall ovens, and baked three sheets of cookies on convection to demonstrate how even the bake is. I have to admit, that oven rocked.

The electric cooktop got short shrift, and he said it will probably be discontinued in the next ten years as induction catches on. He boiled a pan of ice to demonstrate the speed of induction cooking (3 minutes 30 seconds), and also showed a pan of chocolate chips that had been melting all day and weren't scorched or sticking.

The biggest disappointment was that none of the gas ranges or cooktops were "live", so even though all the configurations (cooktop, rangetop, range, all with grill and/or griddle) were on display for handling, none of them got fired up.

I was surprised by the huge number of people who'd never heard of induction, and by how little people cooked. There were jaws hanging open at the cookies "from scratch", and one participant watched the chef make the salmon (take filet out of fridge, salt and pepper to taste, put under broiler) then asked for the recipe! Typical New Yorkers, heh heh.

All in all, a nice way to spend a couple of hours. I am still not (yet) seriously considering induction but the demo was an eye opener, and those wall ovens were all they're cracked up to be.

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Comments (5)

cat_mom
14 years ago
DH and I went to two (?) demo's at the showroom in NJ shortly after purchasing our Wolf AG range. The meals were great, and we enjoyed seeing other Wolf/SZ products on display.
plllog
14 years ago
Zeebee,

I'm fascinated about the people! If they don't know how to season and broil a fish (I know how and I'm allergic to fish!) or how to bake cookies from the recipe on the Nestle's bag, why are they shopping SZ/Wolf? Because they were told that those were necessary for resale? Don't know how to boil water, but when you sell in umpteen years you have to have an old Wolf cooktop? And not even the gas rangetop with the iconic red knobs? Is that it? Something else? Did you find out?

Few showrooms have gas lines hooked up, but I agree it's a disappointment. Sometimes they'll have a list of people who have the new models, whom you can visit to see it in action.
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hpxmirage
14 years ago
Had we needed a large wall oven (we don't - we decided that the oven in the 36" Culinarian range and Miele speed oven were all the oven capability we needed for our house), it would have been a Wolf.
zeebee
Original Author
14 years ago
Cat Mom, I really liked the display too. The chef did about 3 minutes on SubZero and almost nothing on the gas ranges, but everything was there for fondling, measuring, getting the feel of size/looks.

HPX, I'm with you on the ovens. They were really great.

Plllog, I'm still figuring out the other attendees too! There were maybe 20 of us and I spoke in some depth to six people (I got nosy and was all "so when do you break ground on your renovation? What are you in the market for? Did anything you saw here tonight change your mind?") So sweeping generalizations from small sample size follow.

The crowd skewed older - mid-50s and up, with four of us I'd peg for younger than that. I wouldn't recognize a designer outfit if it smacked me in the head, but based on the jewelry, handbags and plastic surgery I saw, this was an upper-middle-income-plus crowd. Of the six I spoke with, three people (one couple, one woman) were buying appliances for their second homes. One couple was proudly buying an entire Wolf/SZ suite of appliances, everything from microwave to outdoor grill, and the guy got a little testy when I asked what other brands he was looking at, as in "what else has this kind of name recognition?" And many of the participants treated this as a cooking class. Besides the from-scratch-cookies amazement and the salmon thing, they were quizzing the chef on the best pans to buy and how many minutes per pound to cook a Thanksgiving turkey.

I got the impression that most people were looking at their purchases as status first, cooking capability a distant second. The ovens would be nice for the caterer to use, but the interest level dropped off significantly as the chef went into detail on the differences between bake, roast and convection bake. These were casual cooks at best.
plllog
14 years ago
YIKES!! I've seen a lot of snark about such people, but this is the first time I've come across first person report of such a group.

The people I know who are in the same niche don't actually go to demos or cook their own Thanksgiving turkeys. They might boil up some pasta or make a sandwich, and might even cook those prepared but raw things in the butcher's case. I'm sure in NY as much at least as here, you can get the whole T'day feast delivered (Oh! But maybe not in Hilton Head, St. John or Cabo.) Therefore this kind of person, in my experience, tells the designer to get SZ/Wolf because they've heard of 'em. Not even so much snob value per se, which the cognoscenti would give more to Cornue, Molteni, or even a large Culinarian--though I suppose those don't have the all matching suite of gewgaws--but just because they're supposed to be good and they've heard of them. But they're really much more interested in the wallpaper. ;)