Hotpoint SI4S854CBL

Verdict

Although the Hotpoint SI4S854CBL has a mid-range price, its cooking and grilling results are a cut above, and as good as those in more expensive choices. The option to steam cook or air fry sets this model apart from its competitors, adding useful ways of cooking food into the mix. There’s no bottom heat mode, which is a shame, but for all-around cleverness at a brilliant price, this oven is hard to beat.

Introduction

Mid-range ovens tend to have more basic features, but the Hotpoint SI4S854CBL is surprisingly well equipped, offering steam cooking and an air fry mode alongside the conventional cooking modes.

It cooks well, the interface makes finding the right cooking setting easy, and the oven looks great, too.

Design and features

• Steam function
• Air fry cooking and basket
• Large internal space

Finished entirely in black, the Hotpoint SI4S854CBL is an attractive oven that looks far more expensive than its mid-range price. Of course, it’s not just about the looks, but the features, and the oven doesn’t let you down.

Open the door, which has a large window, and there’s a lot of space inside: 73 litres of cooking space. That’s as big as you’ll get in a standalone integrated oven.

This large cooking space means you can fit the biggest items in, such as a large turkey at Christmas, but also multiple items thanks to the five shelf supports.

Hotpoint has been generous with the accessories. Two wire shelves are in the box, provided for standard cooking, plus a deep baking tray with a wire insert for use with the grill.

I would have liked to see some sliding shelf supports provided, as they make it easier to add and remove food, but they’re not provided on this model.

There’s also a separate air fry tray, which is a wire basket that allows for better air flow, for use with the dedicated mode. Hotpoint doesn’t quote the cooking capacity of the air fry tray, but as it’s the full width and depth of the oven’s internal cavity, there’s a huge amount of capacity, and no height restrictions.

Hotpoint recommends placing a tray below the air fry basket when cooking, to catch any fat or oil that drips through. This will help protect the bottom of the oven from accumulating burnt-on grease.

The sides are easier to deal with, as they have catalytic liners that catch fat spits and grease, removing them through normal use. If the oven does get particularly dirty, you can remove the shelf supports and run the convection bake function at 200°C for an hour to help with the self-cleaning.

Hotpoint also has its Diamond Clean programme, which is activated via the dedicated button on the control panel. As prompted, Add water to the oven’s bottom, and run this programme to help remove stubborn stains.

With a burnt-on grease stain at the bottom, I found that Diamond Clean helped remove some of it, but the remaining stain was too tough and I had to use chemicals to clean.

My advice is to protect the bottom of the oven by using trays, and then run the Diamon Clean function at least once a month for maintenance. If you want an oven that will deep clean itself, you need one with a pyrolytic function, such as the AEG BPK948330M.

At the top right of the oven is the pull-out water tank used during the oven’s steam modes. It’s easy to remove and refill.

Having a water tank means that the oven needs to be set for the water hardness where you live. This way, you can be warned at the correct time when it’s time to run the descaling programme. The tank should be emptied, and the oven should run through its drain programme after use.

The oven is controlled via the control panel on the front. This is just a simple LCD screen, which is more basic than the full-colour ones you get on high-end ovens, such as the Whirlpool W11I OM1 4MS2 H and Neff N90 B69VY7MY0 Oven.

There are two ways to use this oven: via the manual functions or via the My Menu option. For manual cooking, the modes available are conventional, forced air, convection bake, grill, TurboGrill, and eco-forced air. Strangely, there’s not a bottom-heat-only option, which is useful for cooking pizzas, where you want the heat to crisp up the base without burning the top.

Select the special functions option and there are some additional modes, including defrosting, keep warm, rising (for dough), slow cooking and the air fry option.

Select a mode and you can pick the target temperature (up to a maximum of 250°C depending on the mode, which is ideal for the likes of baguettes made from fresh dough), and the time to cook for.

Not all modes require preheating, but for those that do the food timer doesn’t start until the oven has reached temperature. It then beeps telling you to add food, only starting the counter when the door has been opened and closed.

Switch to the My Menu, and you choose the type of food you want to cook, such as pizza, chips, whole chicken and so on, and the oven picks the best cooking mode. Most modes have an option to set the food weight (or number of items), to automatically set the cooking time, too. Neatly, the LCD highlights the best shelf position to use for your chosen food, too.

For steam, the Forced Air + Steam phone can be used, with a choice of two steam levels. Hotpoint recommends level one for bread and desserts, and level two for meat, fish and vegetables.

There’s no steam-only mode or an option to inject steam with the touch of a button, as you get with the far more expensive Neff N90.

I found the lighting and window on this oven good. They let me clearly see how my food was cooking without having to open the door.

Performance

• Near perfect grilling
• Air fry gives better results than conventional oven cooking
• Even temperature distribution

I test all ovens in the same way, starting off by setting them to 200°C and adding trays full of ceramic beads into the middle and top shelves. After leaving them for 20 minutes, I use a thermal camera to show how heat is dissipated and take temperature readings front and back.

With the middle shelf, as pictured below, there’s slightly more heat (the white part of the image) towards the back centre, where the fan is. Measuring the temperature variance, I found that the front was 200.9°C and the rear only slightly warmer at 210.6°C.

The top shelf was warmer, as you might expect, although the thermal image shows that heat distribution remains good. I found that the front of the shelf was 211.6°C and the rear 216.3°C.

I first cooked a batch of oven chips to see how well the oven cooked. As you can see, the oven is fairly intense, but the chips are evenly cooked. Due to the use of a tray, some parts of the chips are better done than others. This process used 0.525kWh of power, not accounting for the time the oven took to heat up.

I decided to repeat the test using the air fry mode and tray. For this cook, I found that the overall cooking time was similar (standard air fryers tend to be faster), but the oven used less power at 0.451kWh.

The results were better, too, with the chips a more regular colour. They were crispier on the outside and fluffier on the inside, too.

Setting the Hotpoint SI4S854CBL to air fry mode at 230°C, I cooked hash browns, which often come out of the oven soggy. Here, the results were brilliant, with a nice crunch to the outside.

I cooked a baguette using the steam mode, which helped form a nice bread crust while keeping the inside moist and soft.

Finally, I lined the grill pan with slices of bread to see how evenly this oven can grill. As you can see from the image below, the bread toasted evenly edge-to-edge, which is very impressive.

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