Quality grilling: Progress Taste The World Stone Raclette Grill review

Impress your friends by playing dinner party host with the most, using the Progress Taste The World Stone Raclette Grill. Established in 1931, Progress have long since perfected affordable kitchen and homeware.

For the festive season, Progress has launched an array of ‘Taste The World’ gadgets for budding home chefs to try cooking in a new way. Inspired by countries around the world, the range consists of a pizza maker from Italy, a samosa maker from India, a crepe maker from France and a teppanyaki grill from Japan.

Here we imagine ski lodge chic and travel to Switzerland to test out the Progress Stone Raclette Grill. A straightforward way to melt an array of your favourite cheeses that satisfyingly ooze onto whatever meat, vegetables and or bread you have collected for your feasting platter.

In the box, there’s the sturdy Progress raclette grill which retails for less than £30, eight raclette pans that sit underneath the stone grill and eight wooden spoons to prevent any scratches. Super simple to set up, you only need to wipe everything before you use, switch on the heat and you’re ready to dine.

What’s to love?

I never knew I was missing a raclette grill from my life until I tested out the Progress Stone Raclette Grill. I love cheese and I love melting cheese – the very core of what a raclette grill is.

The entire setup was easy to follow. Once I’d given the whole set a gentle wipe clean, all I needed to do was place all the pans under the grill and turn on the heat. The instructions said the heating to the optimum temperature would take 20 minutes which is the perfect amount of time to get my charcuterie and cheese board ready and presentable.

I followed a recipe from an extensive guide that is available when you scan the Progress instruction manual and it advises of some tasty recipes, including breaded camembert that went down a treat. I must say I was a bit dubious that the stone would heat so thoroughly you could fry onions and toast bread on it, but this is exactly what it did, and was just so impressive. Overall an amazing piece of kit.

What’s okay?

The entire grill as a whole is quite large, so you’re going to need a big table and plenty of space for you and your guests to grill all their cheese, cook meat, vegetables and toast a French stick of bread. There is a lot of leaning over and although I only tested it out with one other person, the tiny pans would need to be cleaned quite regularly to get rid up of crispy cheese build-up so that others could keep grilling and eating.

Any negatives?

Things get really hot. As mentioned above, if you’re seated around a small table prepare to feel like you’re in a sauna. You need extra space so you’re not burning your face, but it can be easily rectified if you set the raclette grill on a kitchen counter and your guests took it in turns to cook and dish up their food like an indoor barbecue. A mini sponge would also be a good addition to make it easy to wipe out the pans without burning yourself, but kitchen roll more than suffices.

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Natalie Corner is a Specialist Commercial Content Editor at Bauer Media who regularly contributes to What's The Best. She is a regular gym-goer where you can find her lifting weights and pushing sleds, powered by salted caramel flavour protein shakes she likes testing out the latest fitness tech, smart wearables and supplements.

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