Review: Tovala Steam Oven With Tovala IQ

I get a little flush of excitement every time I receive a box of kitchen gear that I've called in to test. They are always items I'm curious about and ones that have the potential to change the market or, more importantly, improve the way we cook at home.

That familiar feeling returned to me with the arrival of the Tovala, a countertop oven with an app and an optional meal kit subscription. The oven has a few different modes: toast, bake (convection bake, technically), reheat, broil, and the mysteriously seductive steam. Taken together, the oven's capabilities could crush it in multiple categories, potentially wiping out the need for a toaster, toaster oven, and air fryer, all while making life easier with that meal kit service.

It's a lot of rings to grab, but with this, the second version of their oven—the Tovala Steam Oven with Tovala IQ—management seems to have become befuddled by the possibilities.

My review unit came with three of Tovala's meal kit dinners. The kits come in compact containers—a protein in one little disposable aluminum pan and a side dish in another. I made nuoc cham meatballs with coconut kale tofu; barbecue chicken breast with mac 'n' cheese; and a salmon filet with broccoli, edamame, and brown rice. Each kit includes a few condiments, and typically one goes over the protein (cleverly keeping the exterior from drying out during cooking) and another flavors the side dish. You scan a QR code with the oven, which makes some anachronistic noises reminiscent of the Electronic Quarterback game I played in the 1980s, and then—boop!—it cooks your dinner.

"What's that thing called again?" asked my wife Elisabeth. "The Tuvalu?"

I set some meal kit options down in front of her and she stopped bothering to wonder.

"These are good!" she proclaimed, and I agreed. The Tovala meals are efficient, quick (mine took between 13 and 20 minutes to prepare), and tasty.

Of course, there are a few issues. The kits don't solve the meal-kit packaging problem. My three meals shipped in a box with a 3 pound 11 ounce block of Glacier Ice, a frozen gel that you’re supposed to dispose of by draining the gel into the trash. The box was lined with the kind of insulating material that seems eco-friendly, but will likely end up in the garbage because nobody can figure out if or how to recycle it. If you like making your own dinner, it’s worth noting that these kits are more about putting things in the oven than real cooking. At $12 a meal, why not just get takeout, save a tree, and support a business in your neighborhood?

I was eager to try some non-kit cooking, and at first glance, I found an admirable modesty to Tovala's recipes. Simplicity is a good way to get people cooking and comfortable with the oven. The more I used it, though, the more I wished Tovala would hire a chef and a recipe tester to effectively put the oven's skills to the fore. (Perhaps they could borrow them from the meal kit team?) Also, countertop ovens like this one are tiny and you can only make so much food at a time. Feeding more than about 1.5 hungry people at once can be tricky, if not impossible.

One of the most exciting features of the Tovala is programmed cooking where recipes are also preset programs. Their spatchcocked chicken recipe, for instance, bakes at 450 degrees Fahrenheit, peppering short bursts of steam heat (which transfers heat like a son-of-a-gun and keeps things from drying up) between longer blasts of convection heat. Other recipes might add a broil cycle at the end for a bit of browning. Once you get the hang of a master recipe, you can use the app to tweak it to your personal preferences.

Yet the provided recipes show that Tovala has yet to fully master those capabilities themselves. With a tiny amount of basic recipes on offer and some new techniques every user could take advantage of, every recipe should be able to make customers say, "Holy cow, I made this!" the way the Hestan Cue does.

Tovala does get it right on a couple meals: The spatchcocked chicken turned out to be one of the best things you can make with the oven. The recipe surprised me with its simplicity: rub the bird with oil, coat it with salt and pepper (I used up some aging spice mix), pop it in the cold oven and cook. Forty-two minutes later, out came the bird.

"Man, I love your Demi Lovato oven," said Elisabeth, taking her first bite of the juicy chicken.

Soon after, I made baby back ribs with equally impressive results, the oven automatically shifting different heat modes and temperatures for tender meat that came cleanly off the bone. Next time, I might try to tweak the cooking cycles on the app for a longer broil at the end to get a bit more tasty caramelization, but I'd be starting from an excellent base.

Beyond these two hits, things got wobbly in my testing—especially on the quick, simple meals that the Tovala should do best.

Take the recipe for Italian sausage, which calls for "standard sized" links. I'm not sure what that means, so I put two links from Bob's Quality Meats and one from the national Johnsonville brand on the tray, hit start, and crossed my fingers. When the oven beeped (touchown!) Bob's sausages emerged at a near-perfect 165 degrees Fahrenheit, but only brown on the bottom where they touched the sheet tray. The slightly-smaller Johnsonville was way over what it needs to be at about 200 degrees, and brown only on the top. Chicken wings held promise, theoretically taking advantage of the convection heat to compete with air fryers, but the results were nothing to write home about—at least, not with Tovala's recipe. Mine came out pale and not terribly tender. Similarly, the shrimp cooking part of a "shrimp cocktail Caesar salad" (whatever that is) made for overdone, under-crisp crustaceans. A ricotta and pepper frittata puffed up like a soufflé, but by the time it made the short trip to the table, it shrank, got slightly rubbery, and turned into nothing I'd make again.

Despite these crummy results, I was still excited to make toast. The Tovala cycles between the steam, bake, and broil settings in pursuit of toast perfection, and I was steeling myself for the dethroning of my favorite toaster, the Balmuda. I put four lovely slices of sourdough from Columbia City Bakery in the Tovala and learned three things: It took forever (close to ten minutes), the bottom browned up much more than the top, and there's a hot spot in the back right corner. I had better luck when I moved the oven rack up a level, but those slices still took a long time and were neither as good nor as quickly and evenly done as the two slices in the Cuisinart four-slot toaster Elisabeth and I got six years ago for our wedding. Finally, it's needlessly hard to know how much water is in the oven for steam heating, when all it needs is a meter like you'd find on an iron.

C'mon, Team Tovala! You've got a really interesting oven! How are you flubbing this so effectively?

The company seems intent on concentrating on its meal kits, perhaps due to the consistent long-term earnings that kit subscribers could produce. But there's so much happening in kitchen tech right now—why not show folks how to use yours to make some great food, starting with testing your own recipes? Those wings not crisping up the way they should? Suggest patting them down before they go in and maybe give 'em a flip halfway through. Or try a slow, low-temp steam cycle and a broiler blast at the end. Experiment like I did and suggest putting them on a little rack to get some hot air on their undersides. Figure out how to brown sausages on the top and the bottom.

Tovala also missed an opportunity to explain what steam heat does and why it's helpful. Steam cooking is a restaurant chef favorite, but it's both tricky to understand and with little out there for curious people to explore. I ended up researching in Modernist Cuisine and Modernist Bread, both of which made for fantastic references and got me excited for the possibilities. But without a little more help from Tovala, it's hard to know what exactly is happening in the oven, how to control it, and what to expect when you hit the steam button. I ended up and trying a recipe for lemon curd I found online, and crossed my fingers. It was great! How about showcasing a few recipes that highlight the technique so people get a sense of what they're doing? After that, try a recipe for good oven-cooked shrimp, taste yours again, then figure out how to bridge that gap.

It could be that Tovala's ambition is to be bought by some larger oven manufacturer or meal-kit maker, but a little more effort on the cheffing and testing end might lead to some success stories and loyal fans. Or, they could stay the course, make their customers figure out the best ways to use their oven on their own, and, you know, see what happens.

In my kitchen at least, the Tovala's about to be shipped back, while the appliances I have on the counter are safely staying right where they are.