Review: Brava Oven

A peculiar countertop oven debuted with a splash in 2018, wooing cookery nerds like me with claims of "pure light" heating and using connected cooking to streamline dinner-making. The brand even had a flashy showroom in the California Bay Area. But as quickly as that showroom appeared, it disappeared, closing in May 2019, leaving many to wonder if the company, Brava, would follow suit. That fall, however, Brava was acquired, injecting life (and cash) into the manufacturer and helping to, um, keep the light alive.

Pure or impure, the pricey Brava oven—$1,095 plus pan sets that can add up to $400 to the tab—is unique. It’s a large, pleasantly solid silver box with no window in the door, and just a little video touchscreen on top so you can watch what's happening inside. That's next to the start button, and the rest of the top is a large silicone pad where you can safely set down hot trays.

"Cooking with light" is a novel approach, with sets of computer-controlled halogen lamps heating from above and below, allowing you to cook different kinds of food with different amounts of heat on the same cooking tray.

Photograph: Brava

In the Brava, you can make bacon, burgers, and brussels sprouts, or ribs, rice, and roast veggies, the Brava sometimes blurring the line between what you'd usually do in an oven and in a skillet. You can also make “combos” like salmon and green beans, a more technically challenging feat, with each type of food getting slightly different treatment. It also allows you to cook more food. To make this work, the two trays that come with it, glass and metal, are divided into three zones each. That salmon goes in zone one, the green beans in zones two and three. Top and bottom, front and back, the elements light up independently depending on what you're cooking, heating the salmon filets from below, for example, as a way to crisp the skin. Occasionally, as you cook, it takes on a slow-motion disco vibe in the relatively ample—6.5 inches high, 13 inches wide, and 12.5 inches deep—interior.

Like many smart kitchen appliances, Brava offers a guided cooking experience: You browse recipes on a phone or computer, zap them over to the oven (currently a phone-only feature), then cook.

Does it sound like I'm selling something when I say "Cook with the power of light in three zones?" Quell that sarcastic thought, friend, at least for a moment.

When deciding what to cook, I asked the Brava team for their most popular dishes, and they sent their 20 most-cooked recipes from the past two years. The list could be subtitled “Basics, with a side of fun,” with food like fried eggs, bacon, frozen pizza, grilled cheese, skin-on salmon, mini pancake muffins, chicken wings, that kind of thing. I'd round out the testing with a few classics.

Photograph: Brava

One of the first things I made was that salmon and green bean combo, where you stick a stubby temperature probe into one of the filets in zone one and a half-pound of beans in zones two and three. The salmon came out nicely, not overdone, and with a bit of crispiness to the skin, while the green beans kept a pleasing bit of crunch. This “cook two different things at once” is a cool trick, like a high-tech sheet-pan dinner, though the thermometer is awkward enough that I fantasized about Brava partnering with cordless-probe maker Meater. It also reminded me of better salmon I'd recently had out of another zone-less, lightless, much less expensive countertop oven.

As we ate, my wife Elisabeth asked me, "Hey, did you notice the lights flickering before I came upstairs?" Indeed, I had, and I noticed with worry that despite conforming to its electrical requirements, the 1800-watt oven made the LEDs flicker throughout our townhouse while it ran. This was fine for a testing period, but it would have driven me a little nuts if I owned the machine and used it daily. Nothing I've ever tested in my kitchen, often using that very GFCI outlet, has done this.

The next morning, I made open-faced prosciutto, Gruyère, and egg sandwiches, a clever trick in the Brava where one side of buttered bread gets toasty on the bottom tray as the prosciutto warms on top of it and the cheese goes full Swiss melty goodness. Meanwhile, on the top shelf in an “egg tray,” the eggs cooked just like we like them, with soft-cooked whites and a runny yolk. One thing I hoped wouldn't be indicative of things to come was the recipe calling for a baguette, a weird choice considering something with two flat sides is far better for something like this.

(Side note: the egg tray accessory should come standard with the oven instead of being sold alone for $45, or part of the $200 “Bake and Breakfast” and $400 “Chef’s Choice" pan set.)

Staying with the breakfast vibe for a sec, I found the Brava to be just OK at toast. You're supposed to choose a bread type—white, wheat, or sourdough, and that's it for options—and the doneness level. That’s a lot of fussin' for a Tuesday morning (or any morning, really) compared to my lovely, eight-year old Cuisinart slot toaster, where you just press down the button and watch the wires get hot. In the Brava, I did toast some rustic olive loaf kind of bread and did a few “touch up” time additions at the end, not realizing that while the top wasn't taking on much color, the bottom was burn-attaching itself to the tray. While my Cuisinart has a Defrost button for frozen slices, there's also no preprogrammed way to handle that in the Brava. I emailed the customer service folks to make sure, and they quickly responded, saying to do it like regular toast slices, but "definitely keep an eye on them."

Chicken wings were basic but tasty, cooked right on the tray with nothing but salt, then coated with hot sauce when they finished cooking. Chanterelles, which I sliced to an even quarter-inch and tossed with oil and salt were simple, extremely tasty, and pleasingly hands-off.

One thing I did run into, though, was the odd specificity it required of the amounts of food you could cook in the zones. Green beans, for example are supposed to be cooked with "about 20 beans per full zone" and (same recipe) to "make sure zones are completely full." So aside from wondering how much 20 beans weigh, if you have 30, you're out of luck. The bean program will overcook too few beans and likely both over- and undercook too many. Versions of this played out often during testing. On a plain ol' sheet pan in a regular oven, you can cook as many as you want as the problem is easier to overcome.

Photograph: Brava

The more I cooked, the more I lost interest in the Brava. Whole roast chicken—something an expensive smart oven should absolutely knock out of the park—sits flat on the tray, sprinkled with salt, the temperature probe in the thickest part of the breast. That's the whole recipe. While it's cooking, go look at chicken recipes from your favorite cookbook or website. You can certainly find others with nothing but salt and pepper, but why not gussy it up? How about a little oil on the skin? Two of my favorite chefs, Julia Child and Simon Hopkinson, have surprisingly simple techniques that involve slathering the bird with butter and popping a bouquet of herbs or half a lemon in the cavity. When you make something like this at home, it can blow the pants off of most fancy-restaurant chicken, and it costs a fraction of the price. So, not to sound like I'm getting a bit wound up, but how about something like that for your baseline chicken recipe in the $1,000-plus countertop oven?

I went for fun with what turned out to be the last test, trying the oven’s program for mini-muffin pancakes, making breakfast for Elisabeth and I. To do this, you make batter following Brava’s recipe or use your favorite boxed mix, pouring about a quarter cup into each of the four divots of the egg tray and hit Start. Not long later, it beeped, and out emerged four UFO-shaped pancakes. I stuck those in my preheated home oven to stay warm and made another batch. I should also mention that between the first and second batches, the machine suggested that I let it cool down for a bit before starting the next batch, which really does not fit in with my personal ethos for making pancakes. I'd also used the Brava to make a lovely tray of bacon. This was plenty of food for us, and the “mini-muffin” shape was easy to get over. As Elisabeth said, "I don't know if the pancake benefits from being turned into a muffin shape, but it didn't not benefit."

After breakfast, I poked around and realized I didn't have four more pancakes' worth of batter, and the instructions seemed to imply four or none at all. I asked a company rep who advised filling the empty wells with about two tablespoons of water, which, when combined with a clackety metal tray over ultra-hot halogen bulbs, felt like more than I wanted to worry about.

Speaking of talking with the company rep, I started wondering about the privacy setup of an internet-connected oven with a camera inside of it. I asked if Brava knows everything users cook in it, and the answer felt like a polite version of "Yeah, but you trust us, right?" or as they put it, "Cooking metrics aren’t filed under any one individual; it’s tied to the serial number of the Brava." I also asked twice how to dial in the most private settings, barring turning off the Wi-Fi. The second time I asked, the company responded that "currently, the steps for the most private settings are to disable Wi-Fi." Bear that in mind when you make your purchase decision.

Photograph: Brava

My big issue with the Brava is why you would buy it in the first place. There's no compelling reason to buy it for manual cooking, as you could buy a large, useful, dependable toaster oven for a fraction of the price. (Serious! The luxury yachts of the toaster-oven set cost less than $300.) The Brava marketing likes to tout how fast it preheats, but given that most food requires prep before being cooked—during which time, most ovens will be able to preheat—this doesn't feel like a problem that needed solving. Plus, and this is a little nuts to me, you could get a well-rated, full-size oven and a fantastic cookbook or three for about the same price. You’d also learn way more about cooking, and have much more flexibility in what you cook and the amounts of food you can make.

This leaves the guided/connected cooking to take up the slack. Excellent connected cooking can be a big lift in the home kitchen (see my Thermomix review for a good example), and the Brava's user experience is fine but not extraordinary. While machines like the Thermomix help make you a better chef, I never got the sense I was learning how to cook with the Brava; I was learning to prep for the machine. It's not teaching transferable skills, it's teaching you how to cook with the only pure-light, zone-cooking machine on the market.

On my last night with the Brava, I was going to make shrimp in it, but none of its shrimp recipes had fresh garlic in them, which felt like a crime. I got out my skillet and sautéed them with garlic and butter. My lights did not flicker. Dinner was divine.