Review: Anova Precision Oven

I'm not terribly monogamous when it comes to following recipes. I might get inspired to roast a chicken reading Edna Lewis or Julia Child, then borrow a technique from Cook's Illustrated and Judy Rogers, then look up a Lior Lev Sercarz spice mix, all part of my fussy little quest to get one bird as good as it can be.

If that sort of tinkering sounds like fun, allow me to introduce you to your favorite new appliance, the Anova Precision Oven.

A countertop marvel, the Anova acts like a normal oven, but also uses steam, a remarkably efficient heat-transfer method that is the favorite of restaurant chefs everywhere. Faithful readers might ask themselves at this point, isn't Anova the sous vide company? Yes! And that's where the magic of steam comes in—a steam oven allows you to get sous-vide style results without the bag.

"With steam, you can sous vide in the oven," says Montgomery Lau, executive chef at Bacchus Restaurant in Vancouver, "It replaces sous vide in the pro kitchen."

Steak is a classic example of where sous vide's low-temperature treatment excels. Easy to overcook on the stove or the grill, a thick steak is hard to screw up in sous vide. Put it in a Ziploc, put the bag in a pot of water heated to the temperature to which you want to cook the steak—129 degrees Fahrenheit for a lovely medium rare—come back in an hour or so, pat it dry, and quickly sear the top and bottom in a hot skillet. Since it's already cooked through, all you're after in this last step is some nice browning. In the Anova oven, I set the temperature, cranked up the steam, put the steak on a sheet pan, slid it into the oven, and went for a run. When I got back, I patted down the ribeye, seared it quickly, and sat down to a perfect steak. It's about as hands-off as good steak gets.

Pork tenderloin, beautifully pink from top to bottom, took the same amount of non-effort. The next day I made a quiche with a pleasing, near-custardy texture.

Behold, the power of steam, a restaurant kitchen superpower (you'll hear chefs refer to it as a "combi" oven) now trickling down to we home-kitchen mortals. While you can certainly do regular oven things in it like bake, convection bake, roast, or broil, in the Anova the big change is steam. For this, there's a large water tank that sits on the right side of the oven and lets out the occasional gurgle.

It's worth noting that it's a countertop behemoth, almost 2 feet wide and 1.5 feet deep.

(I should also disclose that I was paid to moderate panels as part of a 2019 smart home technology conference run by Anova's owner, Electrolux.)

What makes steam special? Its ability to transfer heat. Open a hot, empty oven and stick your hand inside. Bad idea, but you can probably keep it in there for a few seconds with no ill effects. Now imagine doing the same thing over a steamy tray of cauliflower in the same oven. Extra-bad idea, which might net you a quick trip to the ER.

This heat-transfer ability helps some things cook quickly, but it really opens up the door to simplified low-temperature cooking. "Old-fashioned" sous vide is impressive, but those bags are a drag. I love making fried chicken for a crowd on my wife Elisabeth's birthday every (non-Covid) year, using a stack of gallon-sized Ziploc bags, each with a couple pieces of chicken in it. I cook them sous vide, then dunk them in batter, followed by a quick dip in hot oil. Sous vide simplifies the technique considerably: With the bird already cooked, you're just transforming the batter into crunchy goodness in the oil. The end product is stellar, but damn, I feel guilty dumping all of those bags in the trash at the end of the night. (For what it's worth, I've tried reusable bags, but they're a project to clean.) With the Anova oven, you could put the chicken pieces on two 16-by-12 sheet pans and hit Start, skipping the bags altogether. If you've got the room on your countertop and $600 in your pocket, it's a game changer.

"With combo ovens, you can sous vide in volume," chef Lau tells me. "It's real estate."

Plus, while I learned there are limited steam-oven recipes available to the home consumer, there are plenty of sous vide recipes that you can easily adapt to to the oven. One evening I made salmon, dividing a filet into individual portions and cooking them slowly, coming back to the oven to find each piece glowing like a translucent jewel, then quickly crisped the skin in a hot pan. I love the low and slow cooking of fish—it makes it hard to screw it up—and this was so much easier than transferring delicate filets from a sous-vide bag full of oil and fish juice, and a step up from what you can do in a home oven.

I had similar success with low-temperature, high-steam ribs, letting about a rack and a half cook away all day then slathering them with barbecue sauce and zapping them under the broiler. These are not sit-in-the-smoker-all-day-quality ribs, but if we ever go back to working in offices, we could put these in on the way out the door in the morning and return home to a fancy-easy weeknight dinner. On the easier side of easy, I cooked chicken breasts, one of sous vide's greatest tricks, here translated into a steam-oven version, making them as good as they get in well under an hour. I also learned that the Anova was great at heating leftovers; put the food in, crank the steam, and come back in a few minutes.

I also had a lot of fun and ate quite well with higher-temperature steams. I pulled up Samin Nosrat's 2019 article in The New York Times lauding food writer and editor Carla Lalli Music's preference for steaming sweet potatoes. Here, I riffed on Nosrat and Music, but using the Anova oven at 350 degrees and full steam instead of a steamer basket. In a normal oven, sweet potatoes seem to sorta succumb to the heat as they cook. In the Anova, they cooked through in a spry 35 minutes and emerged with a lovely, fudgy texture. They were fantastic.

The food I was most excited to try was whole crab. My chef friend Hamid Salimian turned me on to the steam oven technique they use at Popina Cantina in Vancouver, which leaves the flesh incredibly tender. Hamid sent over the recipe, and I did my best to adapt it to the Anova. The results were excellent, especially considering that it was my first stab at crab and extra especially because I made a garlic parsley butter to dip it in. It was much less of an ordeal than setting up a giant tub of boiling water. It also made me wonder how the oven would handle lobster, but by this point, I'd already just about stretched my food budget to its limit. [Editor's note: Mangia bene, Joe.]

Finally, I tried making some bread, as pro bakers love baking with steam and I wanted to see what they were on about.

"I like it because it allows loaves to expand fully during baking and aids in producing an attractive, shiny, crispy crust," says Evan Andres, owner and head baker at Seattle's much-lauded Columbia City Bakery.

I made the Jim Lahey no-knead bread that I normally make at home in a cast-iron pot, but using Anova's sourdough boule recipe for time and temperature guidance.

I struggled a bit getting those shiny, crispy results that chef Andres would praise. In the Anova, the dough sprang up impressively quickly, but I had trouble getting it as good as my normal loaf—the crust wasn't quite as crusty and the interior, known as the crumb, had a whiff of raw flavor to it. This isn't as much of a knock on the Anova as it might sound; it just meant I'd have to tweak the times and temperatures to get the results I wanted. Andres suggested a few ideas, like turning the heat down and switching the heat source, and my second loaf came out better than the first.

Not everything went perfectly with the Anova, starting with a couple of physical problems. I found the keypad—essentially the outward-facing part of the handle—to be surprisingly fiddly, occasionally making it difficult to quickly dial in the desired temperature or time, and causing me to wish for little dials. (Watch a video to see what I mean.) There was also an occasional rattle from the back of the machine. It usually went away as it heated up, but it prompted me at times to lean a heavy peanut butter jar against the rear panel to solve the problem.

Lastly, I noticed some disconcerting hairline cracks that had formed in the oven-facing side of the water tank. I'm not 100 percent sure when they appeared, but yikes. I could also never figure out how to turn the oven light on or off, because it isn't currently possible. How you can forget such a detail in an oven this well thought out befuddles me, but a company rep hinted that the option would be forthcoming in a firmware update. Finally, the oven is absolutely huge, and you might not have the counter space for it.

Taken together, similar faults would sink a lesser product. With the Anova, it gives me a moment's hesitation, but I'm still giving it a strong recommendation. That said, I might wait it out a bit to see if any of these small flaws become larger issues or go away with the second version.

One thing I should note is that I never fully connected the oven to the internet or to my phone. I'm always much more concerned about the core abilities of something like an oven, and I'm a staunch believer that you shouldn't have to use your phone to control the basic functions of your kitchen devices. Besides, who wants to accidentally turn pleasurable cooking time into a doomscrolling event? Connecting does give you the ability to do things like choose a recipe from the app and sling it over to the oven where the times and temperatures can be teed up for you. It's a perk, if you're into that kind of thing, but I can't state strongly enough that that is not the point of this machine. Thankfully, Anova appears to understand this and left the word "smart" and the lowercase "i" out of the device's name. You know, like the iSteam, or the Steam Smart, or the iSteam Smart, now with Bluetooth.

Finally, this isn't the company's fault, but I'll get really excited when something like the Anova countertop oven becomes the Anova built-in oven. A few built-in steam ovens do exist, but for the time being, they're prohibitively expensive. Most people aren't getting rid of their built-in ovens, and it's a little goofy to have two. That said, if you can spare the space and are a natural tinkerer in the kitchen, the appeal of the Anova is undeniable. Even with its imperfections, it's pretty damn solid. Using steam is an exciting and approachable new direction in our home kitchen, and this oven is pointing the way.