Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro review

If you have countertop space to spare and big bucks to spend, you’ll love the functionality you get from the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro. It can air fry a chicken, toast nine slices of bread, roast a small turkey and do a lot more. In fact, it can just about replace your full size oven for everyday cooking and serve as an auxiliary one when needed. In spite of the range of settings, its electronic controls are easy to program. Plus, this is a very attractive product that will add a touch of elegance to your kitchen.

While it comes at a steep price tag, if you read our full Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro review, you will see why it’s worth the investment.

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Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro review: Price and availability

The Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro is available at Amazon for $399.95 and at Best Buy for $399.99. It is available in stainless steel. 

Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro review: Design

The Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro is a large rectangular countertop oven, measuring 21.5 x 16 x 12.7 inches. It’s finished with brushed stainless steel and features a drop down door with a towel bar handle.

It has a sophisticated LCD display that’s controlled by buttons and dials. Weighing 38.9 pounds, it's the heaviest toaster oven we’ve had on test, however it’s finished so nicely that you would want to keep this on display. 

Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro review: Cooking performance

In our tests, the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro scored well for cooking Brussels sprouts, breaded chicken and frozen and fresh French fries. It struggled a little when frying chicken wings, but results weren’t bad. It also scored full marks for roasting a chicken and close to full marks for broiling burgers. When it came to baking, its performance was impressive as it turned out a perfect cake and cookies. In addition, it did a nice job of heating a frozen pizza. The main area it fell down in was toast, which was very uneven.    

For many functions, including air fry, the Breville immediately goes into a preheat mode. Once preheating is finished, you need to be ready to put your food in as the timer automatically begins to countdown on the main setting. It will however not count down when the door is open, so as long as you do this you have time. If you want to add more time after cooking is complete, you will need to deactivate the preheat to skip this step. For some modes, including air fry, you can set the oven to remind you to turn the food by flashing “Rotate Remind” on its display and making an audible noise.

Food air fries in the provided shallow rectangular basket; the manufacturer recommends arranging it in one layer. There are no presets for air fried foods, but you can adjust the time and temperature, select a frozen setting and change the speed of the convection fan.

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The Breville was able to crisp and brown breaded chicken cutlets, Brussels sprouts, and both frozen and fresh French fries while keeping them moist and tender. Results for these were good, but not exceedingly good as we’ve seen in dedicated air fryers. It struggled somewhat when frying chicken wings though — these didn’t come out quite as crisp in the time it took to reach doneness.

On the convection roast setting, the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro turned out a crisp-skinned, golden brown, juicy roast chicken in 65 minutes. It needed more time than other air fryers or ovens to do this, but the results were perfect. There was some spattering to wipe off the oven walls afterwards though. We also prepared four 4-ounce hamburgers, which came out nicely broiled in just 10 minutes. There was quite a bit of smoking during cooking.

We were very impressed with the results of all our baking tests. A yellow cake baked in a 9-inch cake pan rose to a lofty height, browned to a beautiful golden color, and had a moist and tender texture. Chocolate chip cookies puffed up,  browned evenly, and stayed moist inside. A frozen pizza came out with gooey melted cheese on top and a crisp crust on the bottom.  

Toast didn’t come out perfectly even on the medium setting — it was lighter than ideal. The Breville has a nine slice capacity, but when we toasted that many slices at once we got very uneven results with barely any browning on the sides. Toasting times are considerably longer than in a pop-up toaster; it took almost 6 minutes to brown on medium and almost 7 minutes on dark. It’s not best for toasting for these reasons.

Using the Reheat setting, it took 45 minutes to heat four cups of macaroni and cheese to an acceptable serving temperature. The Keep Warm mode successfully kept the mac and cheese warm without drying it out. On the default Dehydrate setting, the Breville turned 12 ounces of sliced strawberries into a handful of dried fruit with ease. We used the Proof setting to raise pizza dough and, sadly, didn’t see much difference between this and simply leaving the dough on the counter at room temperature. However, if you’re a keen bread baker and your kitchen is chilly and drafty, this might be a helpful feature. 

Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro review: Ease of use and cleaning

The Breville has an LCD display that is controlled by two buttons and two dials. On the panel, in addition to settings for air frying, toasting, baking and broiling, there are also settings for slow cooking, dehydrating, proofing and reheating among others. With a little trial and error, you can easily figure out how to program the oven. Included with the oven are an oven rack, air fryer basket, broiling rack, enamel roasting pan, 12-inch nonstick pizza pan and a crumb tray. On the oven door, it tells you which rack positions to use for various cooking functions.

While it’s cooking, some surfaces of the Breville get excessively hot. The stainless steel top of the oven reached 196°F and the glass door reached 252°F, temps hot enough to cause a burn. On the positive side, the handle and the controls remain cool to the touch. As it operates, the Breville has a dBA reading of 61.4, which is just above the average for air fryers.

The Breville has some nice extras. There’s an interior oven light that makes it convenient to check on your food as it cooks. You also have the option of changing the volume of the buzzer, so you can lower it if you find it too loud and increase it if you want to hear it from another room. When you use the middle rack positions, the rack will automatically pop out to give you easy access to your food. Like all Breville appliances, this product has a cord plug with a loop to make it easy to pull the cord out of a wall socket.

None of the removable parts have a nonstick finish and the manufacturer doesn’t recommend putting them in the dishwasher. It didn’t score highly for cleaning because of this. The air fryer basket can be particularly difficult to clean.

With this air fryer, you get a very thorough use and care manual. However, it has no cooking charts or recipes. You can download a recipe e-book from the company website.

Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro review: Verdict

You simply can’t go wrong with the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro. It’s beautifully designed, extremely versatile, and good at just about everything it does, with the exception of toast. However, like virtually all toaster ovens, it does get hot enough to cause a burn when it’s heating and comes with accessories that aren’t easy to clean and require storage space.

This is a very large and expensive product. You have to be able to afford it and have room on your countertop to accommodate it. But if you do, you will find yourself using the Breville often for a multitude of tasks besides air frying. 

Compared to the Cuisinart Air Fryer Toaster Oven, which we’ve also reviewed, Breville’s oven scored better for frying frozen and fresh French fries. However, Cuisinart produced better chicken wings and achieved a higher mark for ease of use. The Breville has a larger capacity though, being able to fit a 14 pound turkey.