It's Here!: Breville BOV650XL Compact Smart Oven

Been neglecting this blog for too long and since I have a new toy coming next week I thought I'd get started again.  For the past few six months or so I've been getting back in to reef keeping after a 20+ year hiatus and have been focusing my energy on that.  In my late teens and 20's I was really in to aquarium keeping having as many as 18 tanks set up at once, then I got a job as an aquarist at a public aquarium which effectively killed my joy of the hobby.  After spending all day cleaning exhibits the last thing I wanted to do when I got home was aquarium maintenance.  17 years after leaving that job I finally caught the bug again and jumped back in, though I don't see keeping more than 2 or 3 tanks at a time in my future.  May have to start another blog about that hobby since a lot has changed and I'm having to relearn almost everything.


This wasn't something I planned to purchase.  For some time we've been using a cheap, underpowered, small toaster oven at the house that took a VERY long time to get up to temp and was too small to fit much in besides toast.  A few weeks ago the door spring broke which gave me an opportunity to finally get something decent.  I wanted an oven that would fit in the available space (17-18" wide), has decent build quality and enough power to heat up quickly.  After spending a week or so reading reviews I finally settles on the Breville BOV650XL Compact Smart Oven.

At 17" across it is small enough to fit in the space with some room to spare to allow heat to dissipate, it's also much deeper than the old oven which allows it to fit a 12" frozen pizza with ease.

The oven has 8 modes...Cookies, Reheat, Pizza, Bagel, Toast, Bake, Broil and Roast.  The rack has 3 different positions it can be placed in depending on the mode you will be using, the positions for each mode are printed on the oven door.  Once you set the mode with the top dial the bottom dial is used to set the parameters which will vary depending on the mode, for toast you select the number of slices and desired darkness and the oven will set the time.  The quartz elements heat up and cool down much quicker than the resistive elements found in cheaper ovens so the smart oven can maintain proper temperature much better than the resistive elements found in cheaper toaster ovens preventing the top or bottom of the food from becoming over-browned.  Other than the pizza, (which turned out pretty good for a frozen pizza) we've mainly used the toast, broil and reheat modes.  I recently picked up a small cookie sheet that will fit in the oven so we'll be trying out the cookie mode soon and I'm sure I'll be trying out the bake and reheat modes as well.  So far we've been very happy with this oven and hope the high price reflects good build quality that will mean this oven will continue to work for years to come.


The incoming toy is a Camp Chef PG24DLX pellet grill (I got the black one instead of the bronze), I'm planning on using it to replace my big, old gas grill that we never use anymore and the Bradley Original Smoker I've been using for the past few years.  The pellet grill is due to arrive next week but I'm restricted to soft foods until after Memorial Day so it'll probably be June before I really get a chance to play around with it and post a review.