Breville Mini Smart Oven Review

The Breville Mini Smart Oven is a compact yet powerful kitchen appliance that's built to bring convenience and versatility to your cooking routine. Despite its compact size, this smart toaster oven boasts a range of advanced features. In our tests, the Mini Smart Oven demonstrated impressive performance across a variety of cooking tasks. Additionally, the compact design of the Mini Smart Oven makes it a perfect fit for kitchens that have limited counter space, and we think its sleek and modern appearance adds a touch of sophistication to any kitchen style.

Cooking Performance

The Breville Mini Smart Oven earned a decent score in our cooking tests, though it was nowhere near our top performers.

The Mini Smart Oven produced delicious, golden cookies that spread nicely and remained soft in the center. This toaster oven doesn't have an air fry function, but it still produces nice and crispy tater tots. They were slightly burned where the tots came into contact with the pan, but this could be remedied by flipping or stirring partway through cooking. Otherwise, we enjoyed their delightfully crispy outsides and insides that were just a bit moister and a tad less fluffy than what we would consider perfect.

The pizza and meatball portion of our cooking tests was somewhat lacking. Still, the frozen pizzas came out favorably in terms of taste—if anything, they were lacking just a little crispiness in the crust, which could have made them slightly better. That may be because the toaster oven lacks the space to thoroughly cook a pizza. It was a tight fit for an 11" pizza, so the crust didn't brown as much around the edges. However, most pre-prepared frozen pizzas come in 9 and 12-inch varieties, so functionally, this means you can make a 9-inch frozen pizza. The meatballs had a similar problem with uneven browning. They browned well on the bottom, but the tops were softer.

Toasting

In our testing, the Mini Smart Oven made toast with a degree of evenness and consistency not seen in most toaster ovens. We did see some cool spots towards the edge of the toast map, but nothing major. Despite not having a bagel function, the bagels made in this machine were exceptional, with evenly toasted tops and chewy bottoms.

This model was also quick to toast. Due to its smaller size, it heats up faster than many models. It could make a medium-shade piece of toast in 2.5 minutes, one of the fastest in our test group. For a full toaster (4 slices) it took an additional 30 seconds.

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Ease of Use

Overall, the Breville Mini Smart Oven proved to be a reliable and versatile appliance that can handle a wide range of cooking tasks with ease. The Mini Smart Oven earned an above-average score in our ease-of-use testing.

The Mini Smart Oven will accommodate the rack at three different heights, allowing you to optimize its position for broiling, toasting, and baking. It has a single knob that allows you to cycle through its eight different cooking modes, including cookies, reheat, pizza, bagel, toast, bake, broil, and roast. Once a cooking mode is selected, temperature and duration can be adjusted by pressing the temp and time buttons, and then using a set of arrow buttons to increase or decrease the settings. All information is presented on a clear LCD display.

We would have preferred these arrow buttons to be knobs, as jumping from 250 to 450 in 5-degree increments can feel somewhat tedious when using a button. A knob could save time by allowing for manual heat adjustments. However, the Mini Smart Oven remembers the last settings you entered for each cooking mode, so there is no need to enter your preferred pizza cooking temperature each time. There is also a defrost button that adds additional time for frozen goods, and a “bit more” button that adds more cooking time if your food isn't looking quite finished. The amount of time added by pressing the button a bit more depends on which cooking mode you're using. The crumb tray is sturdy and deep, making it easy to dispose of crumbs. It also makes cleaning a lot easier when you can remove the crumb tray.

Possibly the most convenient aspect of the Mini Smart Oven is its compact size. It is almost half the size of most standard-sized toaster ovens. This makes it the best toaster oven for cramped apartments or dorm rooms. It also makes it ideal for smaller kitchens that with minimal minimal cabinet or counter space.

Temperature Accuracy

The Mini Smart Oven really shines in our temperature accuracy tests. It averaged around 13 degrees hotter than our set temperature of 350F, which was one of the better temperature deviations in our testing.

This oven could also preheat much faster than other ovens, thanks to its small interior size. Most ovens took anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes to reach 350˚, but the Mini Smart Oven was the quickest in our test group, preheating in just 1.7 minutes.

Should You Buy the Mini Smart Oven?

The Breville Mini Smart Oven is a versatile, high-performing solution for those with limited counter space who are looking for a good toaster oven. It's built to bring convenience and versatility to your cooking routine. The Mini Smart Oven is certainly not the most affordable toaster oven available. However, if you value compactness, you won't find a more versatile cooking device. This makes it a great value for those with limited counter space.

What Other Toaster Oven Should You Consider?

If space is at a premium, then it's hard to find a better choice. However, if you want the very best toaster oven or more features, then the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro offers an appliance that acts as a toaster oven, food dehydrator, and air fryer in one. If the price of this option has you balking, we also recommend the Ninja Foodi Digital Oven, which is slightly more expensive than the Mini but offers better cooking and toasting performance, as well as greater versatility.

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