Breville Smart Oven BOV800XL Convection Toaster Oven Review

How many times do you fire up your huge oven just to bake a few vegan cookies for the kids? You might spend 1/2 an hour to preheat the oven, then 10 more minutes heating your lonely cookie sheet along with the rest of the unused space around it! It’s a pretty inefficient process both in terms of time and energy usage. And of course, MONEY! The Breville BOV800XL Smart Oven offers a compelling solution to save both time and energy for small cooking jobs! Preheating this wonderful kitchen appliance takes minutes and saves a lot of time and money!

And check out our reviews of the Best Blenders where Breville is mentioned there as well.

There are a lot of toaster ovens in the market, but this one is by far the best! So, the main questions are:

Is really the Breville BOV800XL the best toaster oven?

What can the Breville BOV800XL offer to me?

Well, to answer these questions I’m going to show you step by step in this review, all the benefits that this toaster oven has to offer to YOU and YOUR FAMILY.

Heating Elements and Element IQ

The Heating Elements of an oven are basically, the things that heat the oven and cook your food. The Breville BOV800XL has five of these heating elements (three on top and two on the bottom), many more compared to the smaller toaster ovens. Also, these elements heat faster, and more evenly, than the metallic elements in other counter-top ovens.

 

 

Heating Elements

Heating elements are constructed out of a continuous flat spiral metal within glass tube. It heats up to 450° within five minutes.

Element IQ is a new way to use the heating elements and a better way to cook your food. This unique feature of Breville can turn off and on the elements of the toaster oven or change the wattage of others (depending on the function you choose) offering a smart control over the heat, eliminating the guesswork and giving you the perfect cooking depending on your individual requirements. No energy would be wasted with the Element IQ and you’d get the food you desire, perfectly cooked.

When I say “eliminating the guesswork” I mean that the Breville BOV800XL comes with nine preset functions for cooking.

The Preset Functions are:

• Toast
• Bagel
• Bake
• Roast
• Broil
• Pizza
• Cookies
• Reheat
• Warm

You can change the settings of these preset functions (temperature and time, or slices (toast) and darkness, etc.) if you’d like. And don’t worry, the Breville BOV800XL will remember your settings for the next time you use it.

Also, the timer on the Breville BOV800XL turns the oven off at the end of any kind of cycle as you would expect. This function is not available on every toaster oven (for example, the Cuisinart toaster oven only turns itself off after toasting, and you have to remember to turn it off when using any other mode).

Rack and Door

The Breville BOV800XL has three slots to put the rack in different positions, depending on what you want to cook. This is a really nice feature because it allows you to make sure that your food is evenly cooked and properly positioned next to the heating elements.

You don’t know where to put the rack? Don’t worry. The glass door of the Breville BOV800XL comes with indicators printed on it. The indicators tell you which of the three rack settings (bottom, middle or top) you are going to use for the different cook options.
Breville BOV800XL’s Door

No memorizing required with this oven at all. This display shows you at which of 3 levels to place the rack.

Top Rack

• Broil

Middle Rack

• Toast
• Cookie
• Bagel
• Pizza

Bottom Rack

• Bake
• Roast
• Reheat
• Warm

With this cool feature, you’ll never make the mistake of putting the rack in the wrong position.

But wait! There is one more thing that the door can do, and I think this is one of the top features that become the Breville BOV800XL in the best toaster oven.

The door has a magnetized area that pulls the rack about half way out when you open it. And when you close the door, it pushes the rack back inside the oven without you having to touch it. Amazing feature isn’t? None of the other toaster ovens in the market have this kind of feature. The magnet makes it so handy to get your food out without reaching in and risking a burn.

Magnet Door

The magnets in the door pull out the middle rack when you open the oven door, preventing any kind of burn.

The only downside is that this feature only works when the rack is in the middle position. Perhaps in the future, they could extend the vertical reach of the magnets so that the feature will extend the rack irrespective of the rack’s position within the oven.

Capacity

The capacity of the Breville BOV800XL is huge! I’m not going to tell you boring details of the capacity right now (you can see them at the end of the review if you’d like). Instead, I’ll tell you the capacity of this toaster oven in terms of food.

For example, if you want to do some tasty and crunchy toasts, you can fit up to 6 pieces of toast at a time! Wow.
What about pizza? This toaster oven is roomy enough to hold a fairly good sized frozen pizza. With a capacity of a 13” pizza, the Breville BOV800XL can easily replace your conventional oven.

And I don’t know, let say cupcakes? You can make 12 cupcakes at a time on the pizza pan and still have plenty of room for more.

Warning: Breville don’t advise using glass baking dishes in the oven, because the glass can broke if its temperature changes too quickly. So, you are warned.

You need to have a decent amount of space available on your countertop. So, if you are unsure that it will fit out your measuring tape and compare the measures of the Breville BOV800XL (They are at the end of the review in the Technical Details section) with your space available.

The obvious upside to the large size is that you have a great cooking space inside, so the Breville BOV800XL is more of an oven than a toaster, a big difference from the competitors, which products are just the opposite.

Food Examples

Pizza

The Breville BOV800XL accommodates a 13″ pizza pan (included). You can cook all kinds of pizzas, like a fresh pizza, a frozen pizza (remember to press the ‘frozen food’ button), a stone pizza, etc.

Just adjust the settings according to the pizza you want to cook, wait a few minutes and voila! A perfect, delicious and crispy pizza for you and/or your family.Need to reheat it, no worries. Here’s how to reheat pizza in a toaster oven for perfect results every time.

Toast

The Toast function works great — up to 6 pieces of toast, as does the bagel setting, which toasts the top at a higher temp then the bottom to make the top crispy and the bottom warm but still soft. Frozen waffles, for example, come out great — crunchy outside and moist inside, instead of all dried out.

Baking

For baking, a 13″ x 9″ baking pan easily fits inside the toaster oven as does, of course, the larger pan that comes with the unit, loaf pans and small muffin pans. The muffins come out great (light and fluffy).

Other Foods

There are, of course, a lot of other foods that you can cook. Let me show you more examples. Thanks again to the customers from Amazon for the delicious pictures =)

wings

Breaded Buffalo Wings. Perfect first try.

Ribs

2 Full Racks of BB ribs in my Breville.

chicken

Baked Chicken Leg Quarter with Potato Wedges. Perfect first shot out of the bag.

Pork Ribs

Country Style Pork Ribs, potato wedges, and Jalapenos. 360º X 47 min. Perfect.

LCD Display and Controls

Don’t you hate it when appliances look too complicated to use and you have to read pages and pages of the manual to do a simple task? Well, this doesn’t happen with the BOV800XL. Using the controls of this toaster oven is like using an iPhone. It’s so intuitive and easy to use that you probably don’t need to read the manual to operate this toaster oven. It is really a “no-brainer”.

Of course, as with any new toaster oven, it does take a little bit of playing with the settings to find those that fit how you like your food.

controls

The Control Panel: Temp, Time, Function, and Start. The white buttons toggle on and off for Convection, Frozen foods, and to switch from Farenheit to Celsius.

The LCD display is bright and I found it to be easy to read. However, I wouldn’t have minded if they had included a clock, which would have been a simple and inexpensive feature to add.

Also, a button is provided to convert the displayed temperature in either Fahrenheit or Celsius. This is a feature that won’t be used often, but could come in handy when converting recipes.

LCD Display

The blue backlit Display. Set for frozen pizza. The automatic settings can be manually adjusted to one’s needs. The red backlit Start button shows the oven is on.

Warm Your Food With The Top Of The Oven

The Breville BOV800XL gets hot on the outside everywhere except the control pad and door handle, so be careful where you touch it. However, it’s not hot beyond reason and certainly throws off far less heat than a conventional oven. Preheating is a fast process and the oven reaches the desired temperature quickly.

You can take advantage of this by putting food on the top of the toaster oven. This way, you can keep food warm on a ceramic plate(s) on top while other food is cooking inside the toaster oven.

Also, this toaster oven has nice big rubber no-slip feet that keep the oven elevated about 1″ above your counter top. So don’t be afraid of it possibly damaging your counter if your surface is susceptible to heat damage.

Convection Feature

The convection feature of the Breville is very quiet and you can barely hear it. Some settings such as “bake” are programmed to switch on the convection feature, which keeps down the need to fiddle with several controls to get what you want. Having this feature, you don’t have to heat up your large oven to bake or cook a meal. Another point to the Breville BOV800XL!

The cooking is really quite fast using the convection feature. You can cook a quesadilla in a few minutes. So while it’s not as fast as a microwave, it still cooks very quickly and of course it will brown the food, which the microwave cannot do.

Design

The BOV800XL is heavy, substantial and solid. All of the components (the oversized handle and control knobs) of this toaster oven look and feel like they are built with a lot of quality. The stainless steel finish has a very high quality. One gets the impression that it will last a very long time.

Crumb Tray

The crumb tray in some toaster ovens, like the Cuisinart, can only be removed from the back of the unit. It can be a very difficult and uncomfortable task to do if you don’t have much space in your kitchen. However, with this toaster oven you are not going to have this problem. The crumb tray of this toaster oven pulls out from the front of the oven, and it’s also the entire bottom of the oven. This way, there’s no effort to pull the tray out at any time to brush off crumbs, or wash off accidental spills.

Easy to Clean

The Breville BOV800XL oven is very easy to clean, especially since you can use spray cleaners. You have to spray your cleaning cloth or sponge and not spray directly into the oven but that works just fine. The design of the crumb tray catches all this junk for easy clean-up. You won’t have to scrub junk off the bottom of the inside of the oven because the bottom pulls out and goes right into the sink.

Technical Details

Here are the Technical Details for the Breville BOV800XL:

• Element IQ technology for smarter control over the heat
• 9 pre-set functions.
• 4/5-cubic-foot nonstick interior.
• 5 quarts heating elements
• User-friendly control panel
• LCD screen
• 3 rack positions.
• Auto-eject wire rack
• Front-access removable crumb tray

Size: 18.5″ wide x 10.5″ high x 12.5″ inches deep excluding the handle. Including the door’s handle, the oven would be about 14.5″ deep.

Electrical Plug: The electrical plug has a large hole in the middle in which to insert your finger to help remove it from the outlet. Very nice!

Electrical Cord: The cord is short (for safety reasons), but it’s not any shorter than cords on other toaster ovens.

Wattage: The Breville BOV800XL uses a maximum of 1800 watts (15-20 amps) to come to temp really quickly, but as a recommendation you shouldn’t use other power hungry appliances on the same circuit. Also, make sure that you have at least a 20 amp breaker on the plug that you are using.

Warranty: 1-year limited warranty.

The Breville BOV800XL comes with these accessories:

• A 13-inch non-stick pizza pan
• A 12-by-12-inch enamel baking pan
• And a 12-by-12-inch enamel broil rack

Also, you can order various other inserts for the oven, such as a pizza stone, if you’d like even more options in cooking and baking.

The Good Things:

• The Best Toaster Oven in the market.
• A lot of functions: You can easily replace your full-sized oven.
• Not just a standard toaster oven. It’s also a convection oven!
• Energy efficient. (Save Money)
• Fast heat-up times. Faster than a regular oven.
• The top of the toaster oven can be used as a warming tray.
• The Door seals nicely, reducing energy waste and heating of your home.
• Does not waste energy by heating up the whole kitchen.
• Nice Stainless steel finish will look nice in all kitchens.
• Great operating manual.
• The auto-eject tray
• Very easy to use
• Very intuitive interface
• Safe
• Front-access removable crumb tray for quick cleanup.

The Not-So-Good Things:

• A small interior light would be helpful.
• The electrical cord could be short for some people.
• Can be a bit expensive, but it’s well worth the price.

Where Can I Read Customer Reviews of the Breville BOV800XL?

You can find all the customer reviews on Amazon, the best place for reviews from people who actually buy and use the Breville BOV800XL. It’s also the best place to buy the products too. There are more than 500 reviews available. Click here to read more.

Breville BOV800XL Video Review

Breville did a couple of video reviews for the Breville BOV800XL. We recommend you to see them, as they can explain a bit more the excellence of this toaster oven. Check them out:

 

Final Words

So, back to the main questions of this review.

Is the Breville BOV800XL the best toaster oven? The answer is YES! The Breville BOV800XLis so vastly superior to other toaster ovens in every way — function, capacity, ease of use, and ease of cleaning. You are going to love this toaster oven, and your family too!

What can the Breville BOV800XL offer to me? A loot of things. We covered all in the review. In many/most cases it can serve as a replacement for it larger cousin the conventional oven/range. However, the Breville BOV800XL Smart Oven is much more energy efficient (using roughly 50% less electricity) and can fit into the smallest of kitchens.

I believe that when I make the decision to purchase any kitchen appliance, I should buy the one I feel to be the best so I don’t regret it later on. So, yes, you could spent more money but, at the same time, this toaster oven is of high enough quality and features that I think you won’t be disappointed.

Where should I buy the Breville BOV800XL?

Amazon

Amazon offers free shipping and a 17% OFF. Hurry up, this offer will not longer forever.

The Breville BOV800XL is available on the Breville website and other stores but after days of research I found that the best place to buy it is on Amazon.com. At the moment they include free shipping and from what I can tell when comparing prices with other online merchants, Amazon do currently have the best deal especially with the free shipping option. Also, you can save a 17% of the List Price. But HURRY UP, because Amazon can change the discount percentage TO A LOWER ONE at any time!!

Here are some testimonials from people who bought this toaster oven from amazon.

“Amazon service was great — the oven was shipped (super saver) on time and arrived two days earlier than scheduled.”

“Amazon by far has the BEST price for this oven”