I’m not a Big fan of air fryer, and as someone who makes beef a rare delicacy, you can imagine my reluctance to fry a steak. However, the recipe comes from a trusted source, so I cut a New York strip in a skillet then put it in Breville’s new dish. Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro, blows the steak with hot air, then automatically adjusts its temperature to give the strip a beautiful finish. It’s an expensive, soft cut, but the engineering is superb, creating a uniformly rosy inside and a crisp, dark exterior.
The air fryer in question is a toaster oven style, as opposed to classic style It always reminds me of a 5-gallon bucket with a drawer at the bottom for food to be cooked. Either way, “air frying” is a market-savvy way to describe convection cooking, or using a fan in an oven to cook food with a stream of hot air.
Joule Air Fryer taps heavily into Breville’s 2019 acquisition ChefSteps. The company is one of the pioneers of “connected cooking,” a segment of the kitchen technology market that uses mobile apps to guide you through the preparation and cooking stages. cooking of a recipe. Cooking with an app tends to be a terrible proposition, but ChefSteps has historically been pretty good at these connected cooking experiences so I love my chance here. ChefSteps’ sous camcorder, also somewhat confusingly known as Joule, has an application that is considered the “smart kitchen” gold standard. The steak recipe I mentioned when I started testing the Joule oven is the classic ChefSteps—a clever twist on engineering that might add a bit of complexity, but is backed up by helpful and engaging videos. worthy results. Most air fryer recipes don’t require you to dirty the pan to grill the steak, but the results won’t be nearly as good.
(Full disclosure: I worked as a contract writer and recipe tester for ChefSteps for four months, starting late 2015)
On the other hand, I’m a caramel and custard aficionado, so when I had trouble making the Fantastic Flan recipe in the Joule oven app, it wasn’t a palatable experience. The recipe calls for 330 grams of “divided” white sugar, the recipe says to signal that those 330 grams will be split between caramel and custard. After I set my position, I continued to the caramelization step, read “combining sugar and water in a saucepan,” and poured it all in. It was only when I got to the custard preparation step, which required the sugar to be beaten with the whole egg, with the yolks added and salt added, did I realize the recipe’s mistake. No step for sugar as they should, which means I won’t be the only flan lover.
The jury ignored the app, but the quality of the device was immediately apparent. I’m like an “air fryer with my oven’s convection setting”, but everyone go bonkers for the air fryer. If I’m going to get off the bus my tall horsethis is the machine that will convince me to do so.
Photo: Breville
Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro – priced at $500 in stainless steel and $550 in black – is like Breville’s top-rated $400 fancy upgrade package Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro. With both, you get a spacious, well-built air fryer that can also toast, bake, bake, warm, and dehydrate. Joule Oven is distinguished by its app with almost 200 recipes that guide you and some niche cooking modes like “baking under”, which on most built-in ovens just means “grill” and “bottom grill”.
If you’re cooking one of the app’s recipes, a feature called Autopilot can automatically adjust oven settings while cooking is in progress, which it did while I made both the steak and the pie. flan. For whole rotisserie chickens, the app makes the oven cycle between the “high roast” with temperatures over 450 degrees F and reheating to 115 degrees, along with grilling, convection, and air frying steps . All of that was delivered over the course of nearly four hours, during which I didn’t have to lift a finger.
If Breville adds autoclave features like those found in Precision Oven AnovaHere are some catnips for the primo foodie.
There are also other perks and perks. You can ask Alexa or the Google Assistant to set the oven to temperature, although you can almost always do it faster by turning the knob to push a button. You can ask Alexa when your dish will be done (information is also available on the app) or stop the oven for you. As an Apple person, I note that the app is available on the iPhone, but not the kitchen-friendly iPad.
