The beautifully designed, stainless steel Breville Smart Oven Pro gives you an energy-efficient second oven, limited only by its size. The toasting is incredibly even and consistent, aside from the stripes left by the wire rack—common to all of the ovens we've tested. Whether you’re heating up a frozen pizza, baking refrigerated flaky biscuits, or broiling chicken breasts, you’ll get the same (or better) results as if you used the regular oven. In fact, the Breville was the only toaster that broiled chicken breasts so well that they looked like they could have been grilled outdoors. That’s something few toasters of any size can do.
The LCD screen presents choices for toast, bagel, bake, roast, broil, pizza, cookies, reheat, warm, and slow cook options. Turn the dial to select the function, temperature, and time. With so many choices, operation is slightly more complicated than usual, but you quickly get the hang of it. The oven automatically preheats when appropriate. During operation, the display counts down and there’s an interior light so it’s easy to keep tabs on your food.
We were skeptical that the Breville could really slow cook, so naturally, we had to try it out. Using a slow cooker beef stew recipe on low power for 8 hours, we got incredibly tender meat and veggies in a delicious, velvety sauce. One caveat: we had to scale down the recipe to one pound of meat, enough for two to four portions. Sadly, the otherwise thorough manual didn’t include recipes. Breville, flaunt it if you got it! Add some slow cooker recipes, please.
See more of the best toaster ovens we tested and reviewed.