The Smart Oven from Breville is small, yet it performs almost as well as a standard oven. No, it won’t fit a Thanksgiving turkey, but it will accommodate a 12-inch pizza, a quarter-sheet pan of cookies, or a complete loaf of bread.
So that our reviewer could put the Breville Smart Oven through its paces in her own kitchen, we went out and bought one. If you want to know more about this item, read on.
For this review, we put the Breville Smart Oven through its paces as both a toaster oven and a countertop convection oven. Each morning, we would start the day by making a variety of toasts and bagels. Now that we had the fundamentals down, we went on to more advanced baked goods including brownies, cookies, cakes, and even a few casseroles. We sampled both pre-made frozen pizza and fresh dough pizza. All of the leftovers were heated in the microwave, and we found canned biscuits, apple turnovers, and pot pies in the grocery store. We grilled a steak and roasted some chicken. Then we baked a dozen rolls for supper and a loaf of bread to see how it would do in the ultimate baking test. For a whole week, with the exception of our morning coffee and evening salad, we let the oven do all of the cooking. Read on to find out whether the Breville Smart Oven is the missing piece in your home kitchen.
Key Specification
- Product Brand: Breville
- Weight: 22.5 lbs.
- Product Dimensions: 18.5 x 15.7 x 11 in.
- Construction Materials: Brushed stainless steel
- Preset Functions: Toast, bagel, bake, roast, broil, pizza, cookies, reheat, warm
- Capacity: 6-slices of bread or 13-in pizza
- Warranty: 1-year limited
- What’s Included: This includes a 12-inch pizza pan and a small baking pan with broiler rack.
Things We Dig
- Close to ideal temperature calibration
- There are nine predetermined settings.
- When the center rack is released, it glides out effortlessly.
- Includes a baking sheet, a pizza plate, and a rack for broiling
- Capable of holding a regular 12-inch pizza
Things We Dislike
- Single metal rack for the oven
- need side-to-side aisles for safe passage
- There is a lack of really smart features.
- Expensive
Induction Cooktop with Breville’s Smart Oven
Clean and contemporary style
Even though it comes with a pizza pan, the oven’s size first misled us into thinking that even a typical 12-inch pizza wouldn’t fit. To no one’s surprise, the pan fit snuggly inside the oven’s 18.5 x 15.7 x 11-inch dimensions.
The Smart Oven has a clean design thanks to its brushed stainless steel exterior and its low profile makes it seem less hefty than its 22 pounds would suggest. It stowed away easily beneath the higher cupboards in our kitchen, but we rolled it out of the way when we needed to use the stovetop. Keep in mind that the oven requires at least 4 inches of clearance on each side, as stated by Breville.
The crumb tray, which lines the oven’s base from front to back, is simple to remove. In all honesty, we were stumped by the crumb tray at first because of how perfectly it matches the overall design of the oven.
The glass door of the oven contains markings to indicate the three different rack locations. Broiling is for the top rack; baking, roasting, reheating, and warming are for the middle rack; and the bottom rack is for things like toast, cookies, bagels, and pizza. While the inclusion of a nonstick pizza pan, nonstick broiler rack, and baking pan mitigated our initial disappointment with the oven’s single wire rack, we ultimately decided against using it since using two racks would have resulted in uneven cooking.
Advantages: It does all necessary tasks admirably.
The controls are standard fare for anybody who has used a Breville appliance. The menu of cooking choices is shown on the little screen whenever any dial or button is turned. Easy oven customization was achieved by means of a series of dials for functions such function, temperature/darkness, and time/pizza size/slice count.
Toast, bagel, bake, roast, broil, pizza, cookies, reheat, and warm are the nine preprogrammed options accessible through the Smart Oven’s function dial. The convection function, frozen food setting, and temperature setting were all easily accessible through the appliance’s small control buttons. Using Celsius is probably not necessary, but if we ever use a British recipe, it would be nice to have the choice. The last button may either begin cooking immediately or stop it.
The ability to customize the default settings and save our own preferences was a great addition.
The majority of the default settings worked well, notably for bagel and toast making. If preheating is required, the oven will sound an alarm and begin counting down the time once it reaches the desired temperature. The short preheating time of this oven compares well to that of a full-size oven.
There aren’t a lot of “smart” features to speak about, with the term seemingly being reserved more for the innovative design used by Breville. However, we did like one shrewd addition: the option to customize the settings and store our own. Ovens often include a cookie option, but because our preferred recipe required a different cooking time and temperature, we altered the defaults and then stored our new setting so that the oven would use it the next time we baked cookies. If you change your mind and wish to return to the factory settings, just disconnect the machine and plug it back in.
The performance is really monstrous.
We knew Breville made reliable equipment, so we were looking forward to trying out their Smart Oven. Fortunately, things worked out much better than we expected. The accuracy of the temperature control was the biggest shock. Several different readymade items were baked in the oven (at the recommended time and temperature) and turned out perfectly.
When we employed tried-and-true, homemade recipes, we got the same outcome. In the time we anticipated, our baked products, casseroles, and roasted dishes would be done. And cookies, which owing to their high sugar content and quick cooking time, may overbake in the blink of an eye, also turned out well.
We knew Breville made reliable equipment, so we were looking forward to trying out their Smart Oven. Fortunately, things worked out much better than we expected.
The baking time for our cookies was 9-11 minutes at 375 degrees. At the nine-minute mark, the cookies were a golden brown and soft in the core, ideal for those who like chewier cookies. They were done at 11 minutes and had become a deeper brown without being scorched. The next night, we decided to try a casserole and baked it at 325 degrees for an hour. When the timer went off, it had the desired bubbly consistency all the way through with a wonderfully golden crust on top.
Both the premade pizzas from the grocery store and the handmade ones came out perfectly, with a golden crust and bubbling cheese on top. The key was that we didn’t have to take any wild guesses about the timing or temperature. The Smart Oven’s pizza option is similar to the toast mode in that it will ask you how many slices you’re creating before determining the appropriate cooking time. After we had used the Breville to successfully bake a few pizzas, we decided to stop reading the instructions and instead simply let the oven do its thing. Our handmade cherry pie with a lattice crust and pot pies both came out with perfect golden crusts. Biscuits and cinnamon buns from a tube that we purchased at the grocery turned out perfectly golden brown on the top and bottom when cooked.
While testing the Smart Oven, we decided to defy the package’s warning that apple turnovers shouldn’t be prepared in a toaster oven. The recipe called for preheating the oven to 475 degrees and then immediately reducing the heat to 400 degrees. We selected the Breville to preheat since it could reach 450 degrees (its temperature range is 120 to 450 degrees). Not surprisingly, given our track record of accomplishment, the turnovers turned out beautifully puffed and golden.
Our handmade cherry pie with a lattice crust and pot pies both came out with perfect golden crusts.
To celebrate the oven’s faultless performance, we threw up a batch of dough and baked a dozen rolls in our very own quarter-sheet pan. When baked in our standard-sized oven, they tasted identical as these. Then, there was a loaf of fresh bread. A quarter-sheet pan and an oval shape alleviated concerns about the bread’s height in the oven, and the resulting golden loaf looked great. Bread baked in a loaf pan may potentially fit, but its too exuberant rise would have put it too near to the oven’s top broilers.
In a moment of recklessness, we chose to grill a steak. Both the steak and the fact that our smoke detector were fine. Broiling a steak in the oven is a useful skill to have, but if you do it, make sure the vent is turned on and the oven is close to the stove. We’ll probably just use the broiler for things like the shrimp we broiled the other day, which didn’t need a lot of heat.
Simple enough to clean
The crumb tray in this oven makes cleanup a breeze by collecting the majority of food scraps and spillage. Steaks may be messy, but even when we cooked a steak that spattered the top and sides of the oven, it was simple to clean up with a sponge. Cleaning the oven’s heating components requires special attention and should not be done with abrasive or strong cleansers.
Toaster ovens cost a lot yet regular ovens cost very little.
You can’t deny that $300 is a significant investment. It’s overkill if all you want to do is cook the odd piece of toast. However, it’s money well spent if you want something that can replace your regular oven. There’s no room for the Thanksgiving turkey, but the pumpkin pie will fit well.
When comparing the Breville Smart Oven with the Cuisinart TOA-60 Convection Toaster Air Fryer,
Our interest in the Cuisinart TOA-60 Convection Toaster Air Fryer was piqued for a few reasons: The Cuisinart air fryer costs less than the Breville and has the same reputation for excellence, while costing just $200. The Cuisinart can fit six pieces of bread, three pounds of chicken wings, or a 12-inch pizza, despite being larger and thinner than the Breville. In addition to air frying, convection baking, convection broiling, baking, broiling, warming, and toasting are some of the seven preprogrammed tasks available.
A pair of apron-clad thumbs up.
Truth be told, after making pizza in this oven for the first time, we were instantly hooked. We were astounded by its versatility after making bread, steak, casserole, turnovers, and more with it. It warms up, but it doesn’t get as hot as our big oven, and it heats up much more quickly, so you can satisfy your cookie need in no time.
