Breville BOV845BSS Smart Oven Pro Review

Do Away With Your Toaster And Embrace The Ultimate Toaster Oven

For years, I didn’t think that I needed a toaster oven in my life. That was until I encountered this amazing Breville unit during a stay with some college friends who owned one. Having watched them not only make picture perfect toasted bagels but also BAKE cookies without having to wait forever for the oven to heat up, I knew that our traditional toaster’s days were numbered.

But here’s where I made a mistake that many of us do when purchasing something new — go for a less costly but still nice looking model. I won’t say who the manufacturer of this unit was but it was about a third of the coast of the Breville Smart Oven Pro and I figured “a toaster oven is a toaster oven.” Suffice to say, the dial for how much or how little to toast bread was a bit of a guessing game, and even if you got it right the toast came out splotchy. And while it did have broil and bake functions, the interior cooking area was quite small thereby limiting what you could actually cook to something roughly the size of a single frozen French bread pizza.

Suffice to say, the novelty of this particular toaster oven wore off quite quickly and within a few weeks my wife had put our old toaster in its place on the counter. I, however, wasn’t done with the toaster oven crusade so when asked what I wanted for Christmas I did something I rarely do — I gave my wife an actual idea!

Thus the Breville Smart Oven Pro Convection Toaster Oven became an integral part of our kitchen!  From the jump we were making perfect toast, then we slowly began testing out its other uses including baking cookies, cooking frozen chicken strips for a quick lunch for the kids, reheating pizza, and so much more. It is basically as functional as a quality oven but requiring much less time to pre-heat given its compact size.

In fact, unless I am cooking something large for the entire family, the Breville oven has become my “go to.”  As for the price? While the currently price of roughly $275.00 can seem pricey, I spent more than that trying to find a toaster that actually does what it is supposed to do, not to mention the money I wasted with my first toaster oven.

Here’s a bit more about what makes this so special:

• 10 cooking functions including toasting up to six slices, bagel mod, baking, roasting, grilling, pizza, cookies, reheat, warm and slow cook.
• Smart Element IQ system transfers heat among 5 elements for even cooking every time, while super fast 1800 W pre-heat quickly to get food done much faster than an oven.
• Bright LED display, making accessing all of the functions extremely easy.
• A slow cook function allows you to slow cook foods for up to 10 hours before the unit switches to warm mode.
• Convection powering helps circulate the air within the unit to ensure even cooking across the food surface.