Domestic Diva 2022: The Best New Time-Saving Gadgets Perfect For Your Home
Cook and clean effortlessly and efficiently with these nifty, multi-tasking home gadgets
Domestic Diva Awards is The Singapore Women’s Weekly’s annual highlight of innovative products that help us live, work and eat better. This year, over 250 products across 69 household categories, ranging from cleaning and cooking appliances to healthy meal subscriptions were nominated. The winners were decided through public voting in an online survey in partnership with Milieu Insight, and Editor's Pick, recognising the best in their fields.
For young working parents, there’s never been a more fun time to be a domestic whiz. Our generation not only has a plethora of gadgets and appliances to assist us with housework and cooking, they are even available for purchase online so you can do all your research without stepping out of your home. And if housework and cooking are not your priority, these gadgets will help you minimise time in the kitchen (and maximise the time spent enjoying what you make in it).
While past generations needed to cook and do the laundry in linear time, you can now multi-task and get much more done in one hour – if you know how to maximise the use of your appliances.
Professional organiser Nathalie Ricaud, founder of Get Organised & Beyond, suggests that to reduce time spent on housework, first keep your home as clutter-free as possible. “For example, knick-knacks on the shelves are dust collectors and take time to get dusted. All this time easily adds up. In fact, according to the American National Soap and Detergent Association, getting rid of clutter would eliminate 40 per cent of the housework in the average home.”
Nathalie adds that gadgets, if not thought out properly, can also be part of the clutter. With that in mind, do you know exactly how some gadgets can help you, so you can maximise their potential?
Here are some of our favourite new appliances (or in some cases, product improvements) to get you started.
Did you know that steam ovens allow you to cook more than one dish at the same time, without flavours transferring between dishes? This is the one time-saving aspect of steam-cooking that the time-strapped can capitalise on.
With some ingredients prep in the morning before leaving for work, you can get home, assemble your dishes and pop them into the steam oven together (for instance, you can steam a fish and make broccoli with mushrooms all at the same time) and have a complete meal in just 12 minutes (or however long the fish needs to be cooked depending on its size). If your kitchen is space-constrained, consider the Panasonic 4-in-1 Combination Steam Oven NN-CS89L; its double rack helps you steam two dishes at a go. Using various combination settings between steam, convection, grill and microwave can even reduce cooking time (say, for a roast chicken) by up to 25 minutes.
Rinse, stack into the dishwasher, load a detergent pod and press start - then catch up on your K-dramas or help your kid with his homework for the 90 minutes to two hours while the dishes get done. The Bosch Series 8 Freestanding Dishwasher features a Home Connect function, with smart connectivity that lets you control it remotely too.
A dishwasher may not be the multi-tasking gadget others are, but it is a big time saver, and most models on the market also use less water than manual washing. Plus, dishwashers dry your dishes too, so you can store them right back into the cabinet without effort.
Gone are the days when you needed to spend time pre-soaking or handwashing your clothes. A new machine like the Miele WWI860 WCS PowerWash & TwinDos & 9kg W1 Front-loading washing machine comes with a 20-minute Quick PowerWash Function to wash small loads (such as your exercise gear after a sweaty workout) efficiently and quickly, with less water too. The machine has a smart sensor that senses how heavy your load is, and adjusts water volume to match. The display setting also tells you how much time is left in the wash, so you can get other things done while you wait for the load.
No time to sort and load the machine in your rushed mornings? Learn to use the “Delay Start” timer. Load your laundry the night before and set the machine to finish washing when you wake up. This beats leaving a load of washed laundry in the machine waiting overnight for you to hang it out - did you know that washed laundry left in the machine ends up much more wrinkled (read: more ironing needed!), and the moisture and heat also cause mould to build up in the machine?
This is your answer to laundry that dries faster and smells fresher, even if your service yard is not blessed with good air circulation or abundant sunlight. An upgraded version of the humble bamboo poles, these new systems feature anything from UV light (to dry your clothes faster) and ioniser (to disinfect from airborne allergens and musty odours) to solar heaters (to disinfect) and app-controlled functions so you can switch the system off after you’ve left home. Various brands such as Mensch, Steigen and Xiaomi offer different pole lengths and for different laundry loads. No more struggling with heavy bamboo poles or worrying that your laundry won’t dry if it rains.
One of the most celebrated new inventions of the last decade, the robot vacuum cleaner is your answer to truly effortlessly clean floors. The Xiaomi Mi Robot Vacuum-Mop 2 ProEU is one of the most popular brands on the market - it has the dual function of both vacuuming and mopping. Its advanced sonic vibration cleaning and memory mapping also put it a notch above other brands in the market. Whether you’re having guests over for dinner and need to houseclean while you cook, or want your floors to be cleaned when no one’s home, the robot vacuum is one big time-saver, leaving you the desired results with no more effort than a few taps on your mobile phone.
The key to letting a robot vacuum do its job well is keeping floor clutter to a minimum. “In a home with clutter on the floor, if you want to do a proper cleaning, you have to move things around which is very time consuming,” says Nathalie.
A pressure cooker not only saves time, it coaxes maximum flavour out of your soup ingredients, force-infuses your meats with applied seasoning, and renders meat fork-tender. Plus, it’s super easy to use and clean.
An appliance that helps you to cook any manner of one-pot meals, the WMF Perfect Pressure Cooker is one of the sleekest and most durable brands on the market. Utilising steam pressure means you can even put deep-frozen food into the cooker and yield a flavourful dish in less than one hour. In fact, you can save up to 70 per cent of cooking time compared to other cooking methods, such as over a stove. Because you don’t need to watch the pressure cooker after you assemble your dish, you are free to tend to other tasks while your dinner cooks.
Home chef Oh Bee Bee (@honeybeesweets.sg) often uses a pressure cooker in her recipes like Sweet & Sour Pork Ribs, which took only a 30-minute setting to cook to fork-tender - plus a further few minutes to reduce the gravy. “With the help of a pressure cooker, these cooked much faster and I can multi-task and even get some baking done.”
A staple in the kitchens of most Asian families (because we all eat rice!), rice cookers come in all sizes, catering to your family needs. And today, a rice cooker is not just for rice - some models on the market have been designed for use on steaming or reheating food, baking a cake, making porridge or soups, and more.
If you want your rice cookers to simply cook rice, the Panasonic 5-layer IH Rice Cooker SR-HB14 is a readers’ favourite. Its durable diamond-coating inner pot allows you to wash the rice inside the pot directly without scratching, while induction-heating (IH) coils envelope the pot in intense heat to yield fluffier rice, in less time.
Deborah Tan, owner of home-based business WhatKueh (@whatkueh), swears by her rice cooker to make her bestselling kueh salats. “The ‘life-changing’ appliance for me is my Panasonic rice cooker. Not only does it help me make great glutinous rice for my side hustle WhatKueh, it's made the task of cooking porridge and reheating leftovers so much easier too.”
This powerful appliance can make smoothies, blend soups, mix cake batter and dough, grind spices and dry mixes, blitz breadcrumbs, chop vegetables and more. With different attachments, a simple food processor can actually be three or four appliances in one - saving you not just time from chopping and pounding and hand-whisking, but also saving countertop space too.
Says Deborah, “The blender is the other indispensable appliance in my kitchen; I use it to make smoothies. I’m usually too busy to eat breakfast and this ensures I get my daily vitamins and fibre covered. I prep my smoothies on Sunday; I cut fruit and freeze them in small containers. And then every morning, I just throw one of these into the blender with some kale, oat milk and supplements - and I’m there!”