We Used the Tovala Smart Oven for a Month and Can’t Go Back to Sad Desk Lunches
Our old toaster ovens are dead to us
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As lifelong epicureans, my colleague Paul Hope and I have used the gamut of appliances. Between the two of us, we’ve probably tried them all, attempting to incorporate them into our cooking repertoire. But for every appliance we’ve kept—sous vide circulator, Instant Pot, Vitamix blender, to name a few—there are dozens that we scrapped for various reasons: It takes up too much space, it’s a pain to clean or use, it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, or it doesn’t do it better or any more conveniently than the standard way. (A pot or pan on a stove or in the oven still trumps almost everything.)
So any time a hot new appliance enters the market, claiming to change our lives, we are skeptical at best. Tovala, which was launched in 2017, was a pleasant surprise.
How We Evaluated the Tovala Smart Oven
Paul and I each ordered an oven and signed up for the weekly meal kit delivery. The price for four single-serving meals a week came out to about $13 to $18 per meal. (Some premium meals have an upcharge.) The cost of each meal goes down the more meals you order per week.
We ordered a mix of proteins, including salmon, chicken thighs, chicken breasts, steak, pork chops, shrimp, and sausage. We prepared each meal per the instructions and scanned the bar codes to cook.
We also cooked some foods using our own ingredients with Tovala’s recipes, cooked some foods using just our intuition, and cooked some foods using Tovala’s scan-to-cook grocery feature, a database with over 850 popular grocery items—like frozen meals and breakfast items—that uses a product’s bar code to determine the optimal cook setting and time.
We also considered how easy the oven was to set up out of the box.