| | |  | OVENS & TOASTERS | Home » » Breville the Compact Smart OvenTM BOV650XL | | | | | | | Description: | | Breville's updated Compact Smart Oven simplifies dozens of cooking tasks, from broiling pork chops to heating a 12" pizza, yet it takes up even less counter space than ever. Simple to use, it has a range of dial-controlled functions and features - and a generous 1800 watts of power. | | | Features: | |
• Element IQTM puts the power where it's needed most for each of the 8 pre-set programs
• Non-stick interior
• Function, temperature & time dial
• Temperature conversion and frozen foods defrost button
• Backlit Easy-Read LCD
| | | Product Details: | | | Product Length:
| 14.25 inches | | Product Width:
| 16.5 inches | | Product Height:
| 10.0 inches | | Product Weight:
| 13.9 pounds | | Package Length:
| 21.0 inches | | Package Width:
| 17.3 inches | | Package Height:
| 13.7 inches | | Package Weight:
| 22.0 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 244 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 244 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
693 of 698 found the following review helpful:
 Great Toaster, Decent Mini-OvenJun 28, 2010
By Michael J Edelman
Like just about everyone else in the free world, I grew up with a GE Toast-R-Oven. I cooked everything from toast (of course) to pizza bagels (a great discovery back in the 70s) to TV dinners and even baked fish in it. When the one I received as a gift when I bought my first house finely gave up the ghost, I replaced it with a $100 Hamilton Beach tabletop convection oven could bake a whole loaf of bread, two pies or a meatloaf. It even had a rotisserie with a spit you could impale a chicken on, though I never tested this feature. I used it for several years, and it did everything you would expect of a compact toaster oven- except make toast. The burners were just too far apart.
Enter the Breville. Rather than the mechanical timer and temperature control of the Hamilton Beach (and the GE before it) this unit has fully electronic control that promises to be more accurate in both functions. It can handle (they say) a 12" pizza, and 4 slices of toast. So how does all this work in practice?
As a toaster, it's great. It toasts more evenly than my $20 Target toaster, and the slide out crumb tray makes cleaning easy. Repeatability if excellent, and of course you can watch the bread/bagel/whatever as it toasts, keeping an eye out for burning. It compensates for heat buildup when you toast multiple items in sequence- a major help. Still, for close to $200 you expect more than just toast from a machine like this.
I haven't tried baking a pie yet, but I did do some miniature muffins, and they came out fine. I haven't done any bread yet, as it's just too small to handle a standard loaf of the size I bake. Maybe I can make some buns or rolls in it.
The timer function is a bit annoying in the way it works. You set the time and temperature, and when it comes up to temperature, it starts the countdown. This is fine for frozen pizzas and TV dinners, but less helpful for bakers trying to control the baking environment. I'd prefer something that would come up to temperature and then wait for me to start the timer.
Half the functions on the main knob are for preset cooking programs- like the microwave ovens in lunchrooms that have buttons labeled "soup", "sandwich", and so forth. There's a "cookies" function, but I have dozens of different cookie recipes with different time and temperature settings. This program is useless to me.
So: A great toaster, and a useful oven for baking very small items. It's a little deeper than the old Toast-R-Oven, but still not big enough to handle more than a quarter sheet of cookies or a small pie. Useful, for what it is, but given the price, it's getting close to being a luxury easy bake oven. I think the Breville BOV800XL The Smart Oven 1800-Watt Convection Toaster Oven with Element IQ, which adds convection and a somewhat larger oven is a better deal overall, and if you really want a useful secondary oven, something like my Hamilton Beach 31197R Countertop Oven with Convection and Rotisserie is a lot more flexible.
Followup:
After a little over three months of using this oven, I'm more convinced than ever that this is a superb (if expensive) toaster. Unlike the pop-up toaster on my counter, you can precisely set the actual toasting time- very handy- and you can watch until you get the precise shade of browning you're looking for.
I'm also becoming more favorably inclined to its use as an oven, too. It's still a bit small for most baking uses, but it's big enough for roasting peppers or baking a few potatoes, or even a tiny batch of cookies. I still think the larger version is a better all-around appliance, but for a tiny apartment kitchen this may be a good choice.
Six month update:
I find I've been using this oven more and more for all my toasting and small baking needs- it's even taking over some of the tasks I used to do in my microwave. It's still reliable, easy to maintain, and the accurate electronic timer is a great improvement over the mechanical timers in cheaper ovens in both accuracy and reliability.
267 of 270 found the following review helpful:
 Excellent toaster ovenMay 07, 2010
By M. Lowe
It's a shame you have to spend over $150 for a good toaster oven, but if the cost is not an issue, this is an excellent one. This is not a convection oven, but is exactly what I wanted and it fits perfectly where the cheap one it replaced was.
This oven is well made, the door opens smoothly, the rack comes out easily. The pan that comes with it is heavy and enameled, not cheap sheet metal. The control system is excellent. The display is illuminated while setting or cooking, but dims out when not in use. I found it very easy to use. Toasting is a single touch and it compensates for the hot oven with multiple toast cycles. I've used the bake cycle and the muffins turned out great. It remembers your last setting for each cycle, so if you determine the 'perfect' setting for your favorite bagels or pizza, it's preset and ready to start when selecting the cycle. The crumb tray pulls out the front and is very easy to clean. This is vastly superior to out the back or from the bottom that most of the others I looked at have.
175 of 175 found the following review helpful:
Fall in love with toast all over againMay 12, 2010
By basboosa
"sheyam"
I'm not one to write reviews, but this toaster is worth the time investment! We bought this toaster about a month ago. The whole family (inc. the kids) fell in love with it from the first time we ate toasted bread out of it, but we decided to hold off writing the review for "further testing". Initially, we had a Black and Decker for a bit less than 13 yrs till the toast lever caught fire (literally) and stopped functioning properly. So we needed a replacement. Our criteria was a small toaster/oven, that is not complicated to use, does not offer convection cooking (I already have two full size convection ovens), does not have the annoying ticker timer and that was about $50 - $70. I searched among many brands, unfortunately, many either were simple but offered the ticker timer OR offered convection baking which I know I would not use. The day I came across The Breville toaster and read the reviews, I was impressed with the features, but not the price. The reviews were so positive that I reconsidered the budget allotted for a toaster oven. This toaster is so easy to use, my 8 and 11 yr old can operate on their own with minimal supervision. It toasts toast, and french bread/baguette with beautifully, even golden color, crisp outside and warm chewy inside. We fell in love with toasted bread all over again! I reheated whole chicken the other day, and that came out perfectly warmed, through and through with crisped skin. We love this toaster and thank Breville for making it. I will definitely be recommending it to anyone who's looking for a good toaster oven, and it willing to make the investment. It's an investment, that's well worth every penny!
98 of 98 found the following review helpful:
Expensive but well made ovenMay 11, 2010
By Chidori
I was searching for a toaster oven for a while, but I didn't see anything I like at Target, so I searched online and found Breville's oven on Amazon. I was gonna buy the bigger one (BOV850), but after looking at the measurements, I thought the smaller one (BOV650) would fit better for my kitchen. As soon as I took out the oven from the packaging, it's a little smaller than I had imagined. I should have bought the bigger one. That's my only regret... But if you have a small kitchen, this should be a perfect-sized oven for you.
I have this oven for almost 2 months now. Everything is so far so good. I mainly use this oven to bake, and I've baked several times already with it. The cakes and bread turned out very good. Since this oven is very powerful, I always set the time to the lowest setting. For example, if a recipe tells you to bake the cake for 30-40 min, then I will bake for only 30 min, and the cake will come out just right.
Although this oven is expensive, but it's worth every penny.
Pros:
- The door is very easy to open.
- The trays that came with the oven is heavy, and don't look like cheap metal pans.
- The crumb tray can be pulled out from the front and is very easy to clean.
- Auto shut off function
- The LCD panel has different background colors to indicate the oven is in use or not in use.
Cons:
- Very powerful oven. If not used correctly, it may burn your food.
- The tray doesn't automatically slide out like the bigger version.
125 of 129 found the following review helpful:
Mixed reviews in our home; I like it, my wife doesn'tJul 11, 2010
By William W. Davis
"famousdavis"
QUICK SUMMARY: This fine-looking countertop appliance has nifty, gee-whiz tricks (they make this oven "smart") which appeal to the techie-side of me. My non-techie wife, however, still prefers our 22-year-old Panasonic toaster oven. Read on to learn why.
BACKGROUND: In my home, I'm the techie aficionado and gadget geek. I like seeing, using, and owning high tech stuff. Who knew that the lowly toaster oven could be made into a high-tech device? My wife, OTOH, dislikes the complexity (and, often, unreliability) of high-tech devices. She opts for simplicity of operation, even if the results are less-than-perfect.
WHAT I LIKE:
- The bagel-toasting feature is my favorite and most used. Set the oven to "Bagel" and turn your bagel cut-side up, and this toaster will brown and make crispy the inside of your bagel, but the bottom, exterior side of the bagel will receive only a gentle warming so as not to overbake it. This feature works splendidly, each and every time.
- Another nifty trick is that it knows to adjust the toasting length of bread (or bagels) if the toaster is already warm from being recently used. Now, if you like light toast, it won't get too brown because someone used this toaster ahead of you. Similarly, dark toasted bread won't get burned. Nice!
- The cooking pans that come with this toaster are top-notch and should last for many years with proper care.
- Although compact, this toaster oven is really quite big, and I can't imagine needing any larger toaster oven than this. You can broil, cook or bake many, many things in this appliance.
- Aesthetically, this toaster oven is top-notch with the stainless steel appearance. In our decidedly out-of-date kitchen, this appliance lends a nice sparkle. I may not have granite countertops and a stainless steel refrigerator, but hey, look at my toaster oven!
WHAT MY FAMILY (mostly my wife) DISLIKES:
- Our ancient Panasonic toaster oven had a simple feature that no one else seems to replicate, that is, when you open the door of our old Panasonic oven, the inside tray slides out several inches, making it easy (and safer) to get to your hot food. This Breville lacks this feature which my wife, especially, adores about our old Panasonic oven.
- Also on our old Panasonic oven was a rail of sorts so any cooking pan or slices of bread you laid on the wire rack couldn't accidentally be pushed to the back interior wall of the oven. On this Breville, if you use a turner to, say, retrieve your toast, you might accidentally knock the bread off the interior wire rack, pushing your toast too far into the back of the oven, and your toast might then fall onto the bottom burner (as my 7-year-old son's toast did this morning). And if that should happen to, say, your young son's toast, your non-techie wife will shoot a nasty glare your way firstly before helping your young son get his now-imperfectly toasted bread slice out from the bottom of the oven, and then your 7-year-old will begrudgingly eat his toast because his toast has a scorched line across one side of it. And your wife will mutter how much better she liked her 20-year-old Panasonic toaster oven, and you will feel stupid for spending so much money to buy the "Ferrari of toaster ovens" only to realize your wife was perfectly happy with the "Honda of toaster ovens" she had been using since the start of your marriage.
CONCLUSION: If you love high-tech goodies but you also love your low-tech wife, keep your wife and learn to eat bagels that are imperfectly toasted. For all others: Recommended!
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