Café - Couture Smart Toaster Oven with Air Fry - Matte Black

I love this product. I have used it almost every night and cooks to perfection. It matches my Cafe appliances and looks so nice on the counter. It’s a little pricey but worth every penny.

The Couture Oven is my second smart countertop kitchen appliance from Café, and I really like it a lot. It has an upscale brushed stainless-steel finish with modern copper accented dials and door handle, and a large, bright LCD. The chunky feet in each corner elevate it off the counter about ½” with enough room underneath to store the included pizza pan. They also allow the handle of the door to float just above your countertop when the door is opened, rather than smacking into it. Inside, there are three rack levels where you can utilize the included baking tray, wire rack, or 1” deep air fry basket. The Couture takes up a decent amount of counter space at 14” tall, 17” deep and 18.5” wide. It also requires 4” of clearance at the back, sides, and top for ventilation, as these surfaces can get very hot, so you’ll need to budget for that when calculating space requirements. The trade-off is that you do get plenty of interior space, approximately 13” W, 5”H, and 12.5” D. That’s large enough to a fit a whole 12” pizza, quarter baking sheet, or 12” dual-handle cast iron pan. The unit has four top and two bottom quartz heating elements that are loosely guarded by wire cages, though these will not prevent drips and spatters of food or liquid from landing on the elements. For this reason, I prefer to keep the baking tray in the lowest position as a drip tray, when possible, so long as it doesn’t impede the distribution of heat for my intended cooking activity. I also like that the wire rack has built-in feet on the bottom, so you can remove it from the oven to use as a cooling rack for your food as well. The included recipe book has a handful of delicious sounding recipes you can try, accompanied by appetizing photos. The oven has 14 customizable modes: Air Fry, Bake, Broil, Roast, Reheat, Warm, Slow Cook, Dehydrate, Proof, Cookies, Pizza, Bagel, Toast, and Crisp Finish. Each mode has a range of times and temperatures to choose from, appropriate for that cooking method, for example, Air Fry lets you select from 200°F to 450°F and 1 minute up to an hour, while proof narrows the selection to 90°F to 200°F but you can run it for up to 24 hours. Select modes allow you to toggle convection on/off including Bake, Roast, Reheat, and Pizza, while other modes will always use convection, e.g. Air Fry, Slow Cook, and Bagel, or disable convection when it is not needed like for Warm, Proof, and Toast. Adjusting the time and temp require turning the right-most dial, and the values do not loop if you try to turn past the min or max settings. To switch between time and temp you simply press the dial in, and to begin cooking, you’ll need to press the separate ‘Start’ button. Most modes will preheat first which takes about 10 minutes. Once preheated, the oven will beep to prompt you to place the food inside. If you don’t hear the beep, just check the progress bar, which will be full when it’s ready. You’ll need to press ‘Start’ again within 10 minutes of preheating in order to begin the timer countdown. If you miss this window, the oven will automatically shut off. You can disable preheating in the settings menu or simply press ‘Start’ again at any time during preheating to skip it and start the timer immediately. The one function that this oven doesn’t have, that I use every so often, is rotisserie for cooking a whole chicken. However, I found I can achieve similar results using the Air Fry or Roast modes (with convection), as long as I turn the bird over halfway through cooking and once more at the end before using Crisp Finish. The Crisp Finish function is a one-touch button that you press next to the LCD, rather than using the mode dial, though you can adjust the time and temperature just like with any other mode. Many of the modes are interchangeable and overlap in functionality, so for example, you can use the Bake mode in lieu of Cookies to make cookies, as long as you are able to select the same settings. The nice thing about having the separate modes though is that the machine will remember the time and temp selections that you used most recently for each mode. If you always want to reheat your food at 250°F for 5 minutes, then you just turn the dial to Reheat, and those settings will already be selected. This gives you potentially 14 different pre-sets you can have ready-to-go for your favorite foods. During cooking, you can change the selected time and temp on-the-fly by simply turning the time/temp dial and selecting new values. You will not have to start/stop cooking to add or reduce time or temperature. Also, when you open the oven door during cooking, this will pause the timer until you close the door again (within 10 minutes), allowing you to check its doneness, add ingredients, or stir your food without losing any time. When the cook time runs out, the oven will automatically shut off the heating elements and go into standby after a brief 2 minute cool down. The first thing I made in this oven was pumpkin muffins, as I wanted to make a half-dozen batch without needing to turn on my big oven. I choose to bake without convection following the recipe’s directions, then toggled on convection at the last few minutes to achieve evenly browned, lightly toasted tops. The nice part was that I didn’t need to turn/rotate the tray during baking, and there were no hot zones that caused any of the muffins to cook or brown more quickly than the others. It also performed well in a variety of cooking applications from roasting vegetables, melting cheese, and broiling salmon, to gently reheating leftovers without drying them out. This unit is ideal for crisping up frozen fried foods too such as French fries, onion rings, and tater tots in the mesh air fryer basket. The results were delightfully crispy exteriors with hot, tender interiors, and I liked that you don’t need to stir or shake the contents of the basket, if you cook everything in 1 even layer (don’t stack!). The dedicated pizza mode also worked great for frozen pizza, however, I haven’t yet tried to make one from scratch in this mode. The thing that makes this oven “smart” is the ability to connect it to your WiFi network and monitor and control cooking using the GE Smart HQ app. Setup takes only a few minutes, and the password for the appliance’s WiFi network is printed on a sticker on the back of the unit. For safety reasons, the oven can only be started remotely after pressing and holding the ‘Start’ button on the front of the machine for 3 seconds. You’ll have 10 minutes to choose the settings and start the machine from you mobile device before this ability expires. That makes sense since you don’t want to start the oven if you don’t know whether or not it’s safe to do so, however, this limits the situations in which this might actually be useful. However, regardless of whether you started the oven remotely or manually, you can change the time and temp or cancel cooking using the app at any time. Changing the setting at the machine automatically updates in the app after a few seconds as well. Note though that if you try to change the cooking mode remotely, cooking will be cancelled, and you’ll need to start the machine again manually. The only other feature I think would have been nice would have been an automatic keep warm option following cooking. You can, of course, simply use the ‘Warm’ mode after cooking, but it needs to be manually started. I like that the crumb tray at the bottom under the glass door is easily removed from the outside of the machine for cleaning and hand washing. All other removable accessories are dishwasher safe. Overall, the Couture Oven does a very nice job cooking a variety of foods with fast preheating, accurate temperature control, and consistent evenness. I can accomplish many tasks with just one appliance like dehydrating fruits and vegetables, proofing dough, and toasting bread/bagels and use less energy for cooking in small batches when I don’t need to turn on my full-size oven. While the smart remote control feature is nice to have, its practicality is somewhat limited.