Review: Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Compact

I love me a Breville smart oven. Ever since I began testing toaster ovens for a living, the ovens from Breville have been at the top of our rankings. At the highest end of the Aussie appliance line, the flagship Joule (8/10, WIRED Recommends) and the almost-equivalent Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro can make you forget you even have a full-sized oven.

This sounds like hyperbole, but isn't. Breville's highest-end countertop ovens are far more precise in temperature, preheat faster, don't toast the whole house when you just want to roast some potatoes, and quite simply do more things better. What's more, Breville's takeover of the ChefSteps brand, and partnerships with other recipe makers, mean the phone app offers a huge repertoire of tested recipes and techniques for your countertop cookers.

Photograph: Breville

But the air fryer capability of each Breville device has never been as impressive as the ovens' other many good qualities. They don't tend to crisp up a wing like my top-pick Instant Pot basket fryer, or even the little Cuisinart TOA-70 oven, which seems to add a light crispness to kinda everything. I always wondered whether the much larger size of each Breville oven's interior didn't allow air to whip around well enough, the way it does in a little basket air fryer that's basically a single-purpose catch-basin for hot air. If Breville made a smaller oven air fryer, I figured, the basket could get better circulation.

Enter the Smart Oven Air Fryer Compact, Breville's smallest and lowest-cost air fryer model yet. The company began rolling the device out softly at the beginning of March. The 1,800-watt Compact is a good oven overall, with a number of very smart features, especially on the preset front. I don't often like preset buttons for individual dishes, but I actually kinda love them here. The Compact is also versatile for its size, with three (or really kinda six) rack positions, an air fryer basket, a roasting pan that doubles as a grease catcher, and a broiler rack.

But size didn't turn out to be the answer when it came to crispy fries and wings.

Smart Oven, Smart Features

First off, here's what's great about the Smart Oven Air Fryer Compact. Across its appliance line, Breville has made an art out of the elegant hand-hold, little smart bits of automation, and convenience that offer genuine utility to home cooks. This compact air fryer oven is no different.

The air fryer presets are the exact three things that an American audience will most often want in an air fryer oven preset: wings, fries, bacon. These are the food of the Rust Belt and the Midwest, of plains states and football fans. This is air fryer country. The correct rack position for each preset is helpfully marked on the interior of the oven, but especially what's helpful is the customization of each dish.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

In the case of bacon, which catches an air fry in the roasting pan at 325 degrees Fahrenheit, cook times might range from 13 to 20 minutes depending on both the desired crispiness and the thickness of the bacon. Wings catch 425 degrees Fahrenheit, but times vary by as much as 10 minutes depending on whether you'd like your wings fried hard, and how many you threw in the basket.

On multiple thicknesses of bacon, crisp meant crisp. Fries, from fresh, caught a little char and needed to be rotated a bit, but results were on point as regards cook times. Wings consistently needed “a bit more” time to get to desired doneness, and weren't necessarily as crisp as you'd get from a basket fryer. That said, they significantly outperformed Breville's similar-sized convection model, as judged by family members in a blind taste test.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

The same customization for darkness and quantity applies for toast and bagel settings, though this is all pretty standard issue on the toaster oven side of things. As with all Breville's ovens, the “a bit more” button allows you to tack a little bit more time on at previous settings, without having to remember what they were. And the “superconvection” button lets you manually add crisping air at the end of a cook, without otherwise changing your settings.

The pizza preset is a bit of an outlier, and I'll admit I haven't played around with it as much. But essentially, it toggles suggested cook times based on whether you want to use superconvection to get a crisper crust, and whether your pizza is frozen.

A Few Trouble Spots With Execution

But that said, unlike other Breville ovens whose temperature is sometimes even more precise than the thermometers I used to test them, the Compact is a little glitchy when it comes to airflow and maintaining even temperature around the oven.

Toast often ends up a little uneven in terms of browning, not just at different locations around the oven but also between the top and bottom of each slice. When cooking meats with a thermometer inserted, I consistently ended up measuring temperatures about 20 degrees lower than expected. Not the worst result compared to many toaster ovens, but not as good as top-line Brevilles.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

But especially, the oven's smaller size doesn't seem to be a magic bullet in terms of airflow and superconvection. One potential reason is that the oven's tight quarters don't leave a lot of room for the air to move around when a roasting tray's in the oven to catch grease. The end effect is that french fries get leopard spotting rather than uniform brownness when air frying. And because this oven doesn't have a light, I sometimes add my own temperature inconsistency by opening the door to check browning.

The tight confines of the oven also end up meaning the broiler rack is pretty high up against the heating elements, which seems also to impede airflow across the food. This is a fast-charring broiler, great for precisely this purpose but difficult to use for longer cooks on, say, Brussels sprouts without getting a mix of burnt leaves and underdone centers. I fared better air frying the Brussels sprouts instead in the oven's basket.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Among the grand scheme of air fryer toaster ovens, already a genre built on compromise, Breville's Air Fryer Compact remains a pretty solid entrant. The device packs wild versatility into a very small space. Its smartly designed presets for individual dishes—frankly useless on most company's ovens—are here deftly managed and customized.

But even with the Compact's crispier wings and fries, and its smaller countertop footprint, Breville's comparably priced Smart Oven Pro still takes the prize among Breville's budget-friendly options south of $300. The Pro has a more predictable cook, precise temperature control, and a still-powerful convection fan. And it's been tried and tested over years. This Air Fryer Compact may still need a little time to iron out its bugs.