It looks like any standard convection wall oven. You know, the kind you can use to make roasts, pies, and pastries. And yes, it does that well enough. Except, the KitchenAid Smart Oven+ brings a good load of functionality that allows it to accomplish so much more.
Taking a cue from KitchenAid’s Stand Mixer, the oven is designed to take multiple attachments, essentially altering the breadth and depth of what it can do. Want to cook large pizzas like you see people do in their backyard oven? This thing should help with that. How about grilling steaks, steaming fish, and a whole bunch of other things people don’t normally do in a convection oven? Basically, this thing opens the possibilities for that appliance you’ve got mounted on the kitchen wall.
The KitchenAid Smart Oven+ can do, pretty much, what a regular convection oven can do, so you can use it much like any model you’ve used before. Unlike them, though, it comes with three separate attachments – a steamer, a baking stone, and a grill, each of which expands the oven’s versatility, in terms of the dishes it can crank out. All the attachments are designed to fit directly onto the base pan and heating element, as well as connect to a powered hub in the oven, essentially functioning as an entirely new cooking appliance once installed.
As the name implies, the steamer attachment lets you steam various food items in the oven, whether it’s some side vegetables to eat with your steaks, a bunch of homemade dim sum for Chinese night at home, or a complete salmon dinner. The baking stone, on the other hand, lets you make delicious pizzas up to 14 inches in size, making it particularly attractive for folks who are sick of having to stick to 12-inchers when making pizza at home. Finally, there’s the grill attachment, which brings a cooking function normally done outdoors well inside the house. According to the outfit, the oven can do it with minimal smoke, too, making it a cleaner and more convenient option that traditional grilling.
A 4.5-inch touchscreen LCD display at the top of the KitchenAid Smart Oven+ allows you to set the cooking parameters, as well as see any pertinent information while the food is cooking. There are even preset recipes, allowing you to simply select the dish and the desired level of cooking, with the oven automatically filling in all the settings, which you can either approve or alter according to your liking. Suffice to say, this makes cooking in an oven less work than it used to be.
Built-in Wi-Fi allows it to connect to a companion app, where you can alternately make all the settings instead. That means, you can set up the attachments, put the food in the oven, and leave it there without cooking anything yet. Once it’s a good time to get cooking, you can just pull out the phone, choose your settings, and commence the cooking. There’s even an option to receive alerts whenever the food is done. It supports Google Home and Alexa, too, so you can use those virtual assistants to send commands to the oven, as well.
The KitchenAid Smart Oven+ is available now. Price starts at $3,199.