By midday on 24 September, the fire will be taking on a lot of responsibility countrywide. The boerewors will be curling on the grid, while smoke drifts over the fence, and everyone standing around it assumes the hard part is done.
Inside, though, it’s only just started. Sosaties are waiting on a second heat source. The pap needs to stay hot for another two hours. Someone’s rolls have gone cold, the malva hasn’t been near an oven yet, and the person meant to be resting with a drink is instead running between the yard and the kitchen, effectively cooking two meals at once.
LG Electronics South Africa’s new SolarDom™ seems to be the perfect Heritage Day companion. It runs while the fire’s still going, taking on everything the flames aren’t getting to – and even the stuff it was never able to do.
“Every South African knows there’s a lot of good timing that goes into a successful braai assembly line,” says Carol Guedes, Consumer Electronics Sales Head at LG Electronics South Africa. “Different meats go on in different orders, but a lot still needs to be hot at the same time. On Heritage Day you end up with even more cultural delicacies requiring diligent coordination besides just chicken, chops and wors, and logistics challenges can quickly lead to a pile next to the fire waiting for its chance, while oven space inside is stretched thin too.”
The SolarDom™ runs ten cooking modes from a single 38-litre cavity, including oven, microwave, grill, air fry and steam, plus combinations of each. Its charcoal lighting grill reaches 100°C in under two minutes – 30% faster and using 40% less energy than LG’s conventional sheath-element heaters, according to testing conducted with TÜV Rheinland. Sosaties can finish under that element with the same charred, smoky crust the coals give the meat outside.
The cavity itself is round rather than square, a design LG says increases microwave energy density by up to 25% compared with a standard box-shaped oven, so heat reaches food more evenly whether it’s reheating pap or keeping a tray of rolls warm. A connection to the LG ThinQ app lets a host start, check or stop a dish without stepping away from the fire at all.
“Nobody wants to read a manual on Heritage Day,” says Guedes. “We built this so the person running the kitchen can manage three or four jobs on one appliance, instead of splitting themselves between the stove and the fire.”
For households without garden space or braai access at all, the SolarDom™’s grill function alone delivers a similar charred finish to an open flame. But this Heritage Day, its bigger contribution is to the household that already has a fire going. It gives the person running the kitchen somewhere to put everything the flames can’t do, without asking them to choose between the two.