Breville BOV800XL Smart Oven Review

Are you looking for a nice counter top oven? Then I have just the thing for you! In this Breville BOV800XL Smart Oven Review I’ll share some of the key benefits that this oven has to offer.

Just so we are all on the same page, the long name of this oven is ‘Breville BOV800XL Smart Oven 1800-Watt Convection Toaster Oven with Element IQ‘.

I have been using this oven for eight months, and I still turn to it before a conventional oven. From the very first time I used this countertop oven, I was in love. Everything is smooth operating and easy to understand. There are three key adjustment dials so that you can easily adjust what you need to:

1. Function
2. Temperature (darkness for toast)
3. Time

These three dials make it so that you can very quickly change what you are doing. One extremely helpful feature is that each mode remembers the settings applied to it when the ‘start’ button was last pressed. Always do your toast exactly the same? Just turn the dial to ‘toast’ and press start. You won’t need to look at the settings. The only time this will change is if the oven is unplugged. Then it will reset to the default settings when it is plugged in again.

So let’s talk about those three dials.

Function Dial

The function dial has nine different modes:

• Toast – for toasting bread
• Bagel – for toasting bagels. This is a great feature. You place the bagel into the oven sliced side up. It toasts the cut side while only warming the uncut side. It keeps the bagel soft and delicious on the outside.
• Bake – for baking a variety of things from enchiladas to french fries.
• Roast – for roasting meats and poultry so they are juicy and tender on the inside and roasted on the outside.
• Broil – To make the top of your dish that luscious golden brown.
• Pizza – has an additional setting for ‘frozen’. My pizza always come out amazing from this oven.
• Cookies – cooking are perfectly done. Not too hot so they burn, and they are not sticky or gooey either.
• Reheat – this is great for bringing a dish back to serving temperature without baking it further. Great for a plate of leftovers, too!
• Warm – Did you get dinner ready too soon? This mode will keep it hot without becoming overdone. So many ovens just don’t have a low enough temperature to keep dishes warm without overcooking. This one goes as low as 120° for up to two hours.

All of the modes/functions are time based, meaning you choose how long you would like the function to last. When the timer runs out the oven shuts off automatically.

I find all of the modes to be pretty useful, with the exception that I have not ever used the ‘roast’ function because I just don’t roast things.

Temp Dial

This dial is very self-explanatory, but there are a couple of benefits I should mention. When you have already started a cooking/heating cycle on any mode, you can adjust the temp without needing to cancel or start over. Do you make things that cook on 175° for a few hours, then need cranked up to 300°? This oven allows you to do that with a simple twist of the dial at any time. The dial also doubles as the ‘darkness’ selector for the ‘toast’ and ‘bagel’ functions. Choose from 6 levels of darkness to suit your taste.

Time Dial

The time dial is, again, self-explanatory. You may use it to adjust the time of any function at any time. Does your toast need another 30 seconds added to the cycle? Just turn the dial and add on as much time as you need.

Using the Oven Functions*

TOAST
There is not a lot to be said about the use of the toast function. It works very well. The first few times your toast will likely not be how you expected because of adjusting from a standard bread toaster. After you’ve used it a couple of times you’ll know exactly what to do for your perfect toast. I should mention that this will toast 6 regular (square) slices of bread at once. It will hold 4 of the rectangle shaped slices.

BAGEL
Putting a bagel in a standard bread toaster generally leads to disappointment. Now with this Breville BOV800XL Smart Oven you’ll have bagels that have nice crispiness on top (sliced side) and are still tender on the outside.

BAKE
Whatever you decide to bake in this oven, expect it to work out great. I have had only excellent results because of the ‘smart’ aspect. Unlike regular toaster ovens that are simple hot boxes, this oven keeps and even temperature throughout so that everything cooks evenly without burning. Speed things up with the convection feature!

ROAST
This function varies by meat or poultry type and size. Suffice it to say that it is designed to make your meat juicy and tender.

BROIL
Take off the tin foil and set it to broil! This is great for making the top of things crispy and crunchy.

PIZZA
The pizza function is designed to melt and brown cheese and toppings while crisping the crust. It works great. While this does come with a 13″ pizza pan, almost all pre-made pizzas these days say to cook directly on the rack. It works very well that way. And my pizza crisper pan (the type with lots of little holes in it) fits inside this oven perfectly.

COOKIES
When baking cookies or commercially prepared rolls, croissants, etc, this is the mode to use. It is more gentle. Note that the default setting is for ‘convection’ so remember to reduce your baking time to prevent burning the cookies.

REHEAT
I personally use this a great deal. It is excellent for warming an entire plate of food for one person all at once rather than one dish at a time. I don’t own a microwave so this oven is extremely useful for getting leftovers warm again.

WARM
This function is just for keeping things hot until you are ready to serve them. I don’t generally cover things for this mode and keep the temp at or below 200°.

*Download the instruction book for even more detail

Other Benefits and Features

Breville has really poured a lot of shine onto this oven. Let’s go through what they have done to make it a class A product. The top of the outside can be used as a plate or mug warming rack. Nice! The interior is a non-stick coating for easy cleaning, as well as the front removable crumb tray fully covering the bottom.

There are three rack positions for different types of baking and heating needs. The door is insulated and has tempered glass. Inside the door are powerful magnets the draw out the rack for easy removal of the food on it. Note that this is only a feature for the middle position of the rack.

Each of the cooking modes has and audible alert when the oven has completed preheat and again when the cycle is complete. There is also a visual indicator of the cycle being finished. When the oven is cooking the display and start button are orange but when it is complete the display turns blue.

The convection option on this oven is a great to have. It can decrease the cooking significantly which is great for saving time and electricity. There is also a ‘frozen’ button to let the oven know if the thing you are cooking is frozen or not. This helps it to first thaw the item, then bake. Because this is a ‘smart’ oven, it will extend the cooking time to allow for the item to thaw. One very neat feature that Breville really didn’t have to include is the option to switch between °Fahrenheit °Celsius. Even if you are in the US you might be more comfortable with using Celsius. All you need to do is press the button to switch modes.

My wife and I really appreciate this oven for two reasons. The first is that it is so very fast to preheat, and that saves us time and money. In an 80° room, this little oven preheated to 400° in 4 minutes even. Very fast!
The second is that it is portable. During the summer we put it out on the three season porch for baking so that it doesn’t heat up the house at all. What a bonus!

This oven does come with the wire rack, but it also includes a broiler tray and drip pan, as well as a 13″ round pizza pan.

Room for Improvement

While this is a fantastic countertop oven, there are a couple of things I wish would have been considered. One is that while the interior does have non-stick coating, the drip tray does not. This seems to be a poor decision and I wish that it did have it because that is the place most likely to get dirty. One other little niggle is that there is no option to set the oven to come on at a specified time and start cooking. Many range ovens have this feature and I find it very useful, but it is not a part of this oven.

While the control dials appear to be high quality and of the best design, there is a problem. They are just plastic knobs rather than metal, which would be fine, if they worked flawlessly. The fact is that there are times when you turn the function knob and it doesn’t respond for two or three clicks. Or it might jump two functions. It isn’t unusable  nor is it angering but it is a flaw. I can get to the function I need right away, but I couldn’t make it happen with my eyes closed and counting clicks. I hope this is improved in future models.

A larger complaint I have is that a 9×13 pan with handles will not fit in this oven. What a shame! I you have a 9×13 with no handles it should fit, but I don’t own any or know anyone that does. That means you must either use a 9×9 or go back to the large oven.

Breville BOV800XL Smart Oven Conclusion

There are so many great features included in the Breville BOV800XL Smart Oven, and it works so incredibly well, that I strongly recommend it to anyone that is considering it. After doing my own research I found this oven to be superior to others in the same class in almost all categories. This is not a toy oven for making toast and heating meat loaf. This will help you to get a lot of baking done without a lot of hassle.

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