Happycall Pan

Standard Happycall Pan, $62 on Gmarket

With the recent craze over the Happycall Pan, I decided to get one for my mother. It claims to make cooking so much easier, and has helped many people to start cooking. "It's so easy to use!" they exclaim and swear by it. Some of the alleged benefits:

- Less oil splashing when pan frying

- No smoke and odour

- Easy to clean

- Shorter cooking time

- Less oil required

- Easy to use, even for a newbie

After using it, I came to the conclusion that this is more of a marketing thing than a functional benefit. It does benefit, but not as much as it seems. The biggest benefit is that it helps people overcome the invisible barrier of cooking - people start to think that they can now try cooking with this new invention, because "it is so easy - just put the food in, flip it, and you are done!". But the truth is that cooking is extremely easy; while it may take years to be an excellent cook, it just takes a short while to at least be a decent one. I will cover this point below.

So back to its benefits, and I shall go through the list above one by one.

1) Less oil splashing

True enough, when using it to pan fry food, there is very little oil splattered outside, but inevitably some will still splash out when you open the pan to check on its contents.

2) No smoke and odour

Similar to the first point, once you open the pan, there will still be some smoke and odour, though it's definitely less than the conventional pan.

3) Easy to clean

Okay, this is true. It is extremely non-stick, so how I clean is that I just use a piece of kitchen towel to wipe it, put some detergent on a sponge and clean it, then use another piece of kitchen towel to wipe it again. It is actually advisable to clean it while it is hot, so you could put on rubber gloves and clean it with a kitchen towel or cloth.

4) Shorter cooking time

This is obviously true, since the food is kept in an enclosed area with the heat trapped inside (there is a hole to release the pressure, of course). I used it to pan fry some steaks today, and a nicely medium rare steak came out after 1.5 minutes on each side plus leaving it inside for a while after the fire was turned off.

5) Less oil required

As a matter of fact, when I used it to pan fry steaks or chicken thighs, I didn't use any oil at all.

6) Easy to use, even for a newbie

This is the biggest marketed benefit. True, it makes cooking easier, but I think the biggest benefit is that it makes cooking more convenient. The basics of cooking - preparing and cutting the ingredients, seasoning or marinating them, etc - are still the same. The only difference is the next step, which is the cooking part (and the step after this, of course - cleaning up!), and it makes this part easier because you don't need to stir fry so much or flip your food. But is it really that difficult to do all that? 

That is why I think the main benefit is convenience, basically, points 1 to 5 as mentioned above. It makes people want to try and cook. And once you reach that step, half the battle is already won in learning how to cook.