AEG IAE84851FB Review: Smart cooking

You don’t get any more cooking space than you’d get with a traditional 60cm hob, but the AEG IAE84851FB at least gives some extra space. It’s well designed, with two traditional cooking zones, plus a flexible zone that can either be extended in size to accommodate larger pans, split into two zones, or used with PowerSlide – where you can move a pan’s position to automatically adjust heat. Add SenseFry, which delivers automatic cooking modes, plus excellent performance from all zones, and this is a great hob to cook on.

Introduction

The 80cm AEG IAE84851FB hob doesn’t offer more cooking space over 60cm hobs, but it does deliver a bit more room. More importantly, it has some clever cooking modes, including PowerSlide and SenseFry, which make it great fun to cook. It’s also a powerful hob, with the ability to heat to boiling quickly on any of its cooking zones.

Design and Features

An 80cm, the AEG IAE84851FB is a fraction wider than most four-zone induction hobs. It’s finished in the traditional black glass, but it’s controlled via an LCD panel that sits at the bottom-right of the hob, which I found intuitive and easy to use.

Each of the cooking zones is activated automatically when a pot is placed down on it, with a slider control used to select one of the nine power modes available, plus a power boost (P) setting for rapidly boiling water, which lasts for a maximum of 10 minutes. 

Each zone has its own timer, offering the option to either beep once the time is complete or turn off the hob. That’s a nice touch, and I found it made cooking very flexible: I could turn off potatoes at the end of the boiling time, but just get warned when it was time to add ingredients to a curry.

The extra width, compared to a regular four-zone hob, gives this 7.35kW AEG a few extra features that make it stand out.

First, there’s the flexible induction cooking area on the left, which can be used as two individual zones, or combined to deliver a choice of three cooking area sizes for the likes of grill pans and hot plates. It’s all controlled via the simple touchscreen button on the control panel.

As well as being able to expand the cooking zone, the settings menu offers the PowerSlide option, too. This presets the bottom zone to power 8, for boiling, the middle of the zone to 5 for simmering, and the top zone to 1 for keeping warm. Just slide the pan between them to adjust power. It’s surprisingly handy, and makes cooking quicker, as I didn’t have to touch power settings to adjust heat levels.

Due to power limitations, you can only use P on two zones at the same time. Turn on P on one of the regular zones and the other zone is limited to power 5. Turn it on in one of the flexible induction zones and the other zone has a maximum power of 1. 

Dropping down into the normal options is more forgiving, with you able to run all four zones at the 8 level, which is enough power for frying. Most of the time, I found myself operating at lower power levels.

Each zone also has a melting function, which uses a low-power setting to help you melt butter or chocolate without burning it.

Assisted cooking functions are present to make it easier to handle different foods. The AEG offers a wide range including options for meat, fish, vegetables and pancakes. Each setting uses SenseFry, where the hob will adjust its power settings on-the-fly, using a temperature sensor to monitor heat. Each mode indicates when the pan is ready to cook and then maintains its temperature throughout cooking. 

I found this useful for offering an idea of which settings I should use on the induction hob (each one is different). Yet, once I’d achieved a feel for how the hob worked, I found it quicker to take control by using manual settings. 

Performance

• Very fast across the board
• Evenly heats up

To test the power of the AEG IAE84851FB, I put it through my standard tests. First, I placed a large pan filled with 1.5 litres of water onto the flexible zone and put this on the P power boost setting. This draws a maximum of 3200W, so brought my water to 90ºC in a swift 3mins 8secs; only Miele’s hobs with the company’s TwinBoost feature are faster here.

Moving onto the circular hobs, I placed my mid-sized saucepan onto the larger hob, setting it to P to bring 1 litre of water to 90ºC. Again, the hob can draw a maximum of 3200W, so the boil time of 1min 35secs was extremely quick.

Moving onto the smallest cooking zone, I tested it with a small pan of 500ml of water. Here, the zone can draw a considerable 2800W of power, which is more than most hobs offer. That resulted in a super-fast boil to 90ºC time of 1min 26secs. Across the board and with all sizes of pan, the AEG IAE84851FB proved itself an extremely fast hob.

Using my thermal camera, you can see that the cooking zones use traditional round heating elements.

For the flexible induction zone, there are strips of heating elements, which deliver more even coverage when joined together over combining two circular elements.

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Sustainability

Trusted Reviews’ holds the fact that global warming is not a myth as a core value and will continuously endeavour to help protect our planet from harm in its business practices.

As part of this mission, whenever we review a product we send the company a series of questions to help us gauge and make transparent the impact the device has on the environment.

We currently haven’t received answers to the questions on this product, but will update this page the moment we do. You can see a detailed breakdown of the questions we ask and why in our sustainability info page.