Review: The Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro by Breville

I’m not a big fan of air fryers, and as someone who makes beef a rare treat, you can imagine my reluctance to air-fry a steak. The recipe, however, came from a trusted source, so I seared a New York strip in a skillet then popped it in Breville’s new Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro, which blasted the steak with hot air then automatically adjusted its heat way down to let the strip of meat coast to a glorious finish. It was an expensive, tender cut, but the technique recipe was excellent, producing an evenly rosy interior and a dark, crisp exterior.

The air fryer in question is the toaster-oven style, as opposed to the classic style which always reminds me a five-gallon bucket with a drawer at the bottom where the food is cooked. Either way, “air frying” is a market-savvy way to describe convection cooking, or using a fan in an oven to cook food with a jet stream of hot air.

The Joule Air Fryer taps heavily on Breville’s 2019 acquisition of ChefSteps. The company was one of the pioneers of “connected cooking,” a segment of the kitchen-tech market that uses mobile apps to walk you through the prep and cooking stages of a recipe. Cooking with an app tends to be a dismal proposition, but ChefSteps is historically quite good at these connected cooking experiences so I liked my chances here. ChefSteps’ sous vide machine, also slightly confusingly called a Joule, has an app that’s considered a “smart kitchen” gold standard. That steak recipe I tackled when I began testing the Joule oven is vintage ChefSteps—a smart twist on technique that might add a bit of complication, but one that’s aided by helpful videos and delivers a worthy payoff. Most air-fryer recipes don’t have you dirty a pan to sear your steak, but the results won’t be nearly as good.

(Full disclosure: I worked as a contract writer and recipe tester for ChefSteps for four months, starting in late 2015.)

On the other hand, I'm a sucker for caramel and custard, so when I hit a snag making the Fantastic Flan recipe in the Joule oven app, it was not a flan-tastic experience. The recipe calls for 330 grams of white sugar “divided,” recipe-speak to signal that those 330 grams will be split between the caramel and the custard. After I set out my mise en place, I proceeded to the caramel-making step, read “combine the sugar and water in a saucepan,” and dumped it all in. Only when I got to the custard-prep step, which calls for sugar to be whisked in with whole eggs, extra yolks, and salt, did I realize the recipe’s error. Neither step gives a sugar quantity as they should, meaning I won’t be the only flummoxed flan fan.

The jury was out on the app, but the appliance quality was immediately clear. I’m more of an “air fry with my home oven’s convection setting” kind of guy, but people go bonkers for air fryers. If I were ever going to get off my high horse, this was the machine that would convince me to do so.

The Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro—which costs $500 in stainless steel and $550 in black—is like the fancy upgrade package for Breville’s top-rated $400 Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro. With both you get a roomy, well-built air-fryer oven that can also toast, bake, broil, warm, and dehydrate. The Joule Oven is distinguished by its app with almost 200 recipes that guide you, and a couple of niche cooking modes like “bottom bake,” which on most built-in ovens just means “bake” and “bottom broil.”

If you’re cooking one of the app’s recipes, a feature called Autopilot can automatically adjust the oven settings as cooking progresses, something it did while I was making both the steak and the flan. For whole-roasted chicken, the app makes the oven cycle between “high outer top broil” with temperatures above 450 degrees Fahrenheit, and 115 degree warming, along with roasting, convection, and air-frying steps. All that was teased out over the course of almost four hours, during which I didn’t have to lift a finger.

If Breville added steam-oven capabilities like those found in the Anova Precision Oven, this would be some primo food-nerd catnip.

There are other perks and idiosyncrasies, too. You can tell Alexa or Google Assistant to set the oven to a temperature, though you can almost always do it faster by twisting a knob hitting a button. You can ask Alexa when your food will be done (info that is also available on the app) or to stop the oven for you. As an Apple person, I noted that the app is available on iPhone, but not the kitchen-friendly iPad.

For me, the big draw wasn’t the app-ified side of things but the practical way the Joule Oven folded air frying into an already well-appointed oven. Plus, that air frying happens on a spacious basket-tray with almost double the cooking surface offered in the small cooking baskets that come with the best dedicated air fryers.

I did enjoy making the recipes on the app. I made a tasty miso salmon, and soon after, its recipe for bacon. That Autopilot chicken, pleasurable in that it required no basting or babysitting, came out looking fantastic, with crispy, evenly browned skin. But by the time the recipe’s recommended 30-minute resting period elapsed and I carved and served it to my buddy Dave, some of that magic had faded.

“It tasted like a normal roast chicken,” he said after dinner. While I got to be hands off for the chicken’s oven time, there wasn't much notable advantage to Autopilot’s baroque flight plan and long cooking time. I also wondered how much value Autopilot added to a normal recipe in which you might adjust the temperature or baste only once or twice. You’re likely going to be in or near the kitchen anyway. How much of a bother is it to adjust the oven’s temperature?

I also had a bigger problem. The recipe calls for a four- to five-pound bird. I bought a five-pounder, and the breasts had already sailed past the target temperature of 160 degrees by the time the app had me check for doneness, echoing a comment I noticed for the oven on Breville’s website. The oven has its version of Breville’s famous “a bit more” button, cleverly customized to what you’re cooking, but here I wanted a bit less.

Overall I found Breville’s connected cooking experience and those recipes better than most connected appliances have, and worthy of monitoring. During my time testing the oven, there were 184 recipes in the app, but Breville announced it will have 500 by year’s end from sources including NYT Cooking, Serious Eats, and America’s Test Kitchen, marking a clever strategy of using high-end, well-tested content to create a deep bench. I like that idea so much that I hope other appliances follow suit instead of what usually happens: They're larded with a short and eclectic assortment of usually crummy recipes.

While I hit a few stumbling blocks with the Joule Oven’s recipes, I like how they’re presented. Choose a recipe and a page comes up with the headnotes, ingredients, and equipment list. Tap “view steps” and you can read through the procedure. Tap the arrow to the right of each step and you’ll find a video to guide you through it. Instead of getting frustrated with a half-assed app, here you might learn something.

It’s expensive to do this. Hiring chefs or buying good recipes and building an app cost a lot of money, and to its immense credit, Breville is ponying up the cash. There is a nice coherence between the app and the oven, and compared with the apps on most other connected appliances, the quality of its recipes is high. Flan-style errors can be fixed. Tiny tweaks à la miso salmon (which also came out a little overdone) and faux-rotisserie chicken can be made. Breville tends to be attentive enough to this stuff that it’s a safe bet those tweaks will make their way into future app updates.

Personally, I most enjoyed letting the oven stretch its legs without the app. I made a loaf of no-knead bread in my combo cooker. I was amazed that the cast-iron honker fit in there, and that the bread was good. I then fired up the air-fry side of things using rock-solid recipes from ATK’s reference, Air Fryer Perfection. I coated a bunch of asparagus spears in cooking oil and spread them across the basket. They emerged bright green and crisp at the tip, a method so good that I borrowed it for shiitakes, for which my normally expansive notes just read: “Yum. A great use.”

I also had fun with ATK’s Vietnamese-style pork loin and vermicelli, which cooks quickly: an easy way to spice up a weeknight.

Finally, I wasn’t going to test an air fryer without making fries, yet the ChefSteps fry recipe simply zaps store-bought frozen fries in a hot oven. If there were ever a recipe more up ChefSteps’ alley on an appliance like this, it’s fries. Mysteriously, they punt, and the results taste like plain ol’ oven fries, an oversight I hope they fix.

On the other hand, ATK’s fries recipe has you hand-cut russets, precook them in hot tap water, pat them dry, coat ’em with oil, and pop them in the oven. I turned them into something resembling poutine and asked my Canadian-born wife, Elisabeth, whether she felt like she was being served by a Quebecois lumberjack. Mysteriously, she demurred, but we devoured those suckers in a heartbeat.

It’s easy to imagine an old-sage actor like Tom Skerritt peering over a pair of readers and describing the Joule oven by saying, “She's got good bones.” The countertop ovens in Breville’s lineup tend to be pricey but excellent. You can buy a basic model like the company’s Smart Oven for $269, the Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro for $400, or this fancy Joule Oven with all its bells and whistles for $500. I will also note that the first Joule Oven sent to me started occasionally making a louder noise that most people appreciate in bathroom fans, and when I asked about it they swapped it out for another, much quieter oven. Keep an eye on customer reviews to see whether this becomes an issue or was a one-off.

Should you get this? That might boil down to your willingness to give app-based cooking a try and your ability or desire to shell out an extra $100 to get the app-connected version that lets you play around with it. There’s a painfully low bar for “smart kitchen” apps but if you’re tempted, this is about as good as it gets. The current app-based recipe library is limited but solid, and it’s about to get a big boost from trusted sources.

Then again, I’ve never been a fan of most app-based smart kitchen offerings, the possibility of distraction too present when I’d rather be cooking with Elisabeth and enjoying a glass of wine. You could also get a couple of excellent air-fryer cookbooks for far less than that $100 difference, though a company rep said there were “no plans” to charge app owners a subscription fee as the recipe offerings on the app grow. Compared to the no-app version of the oven, this one has more options. Do you really need them? Not really. Are they helpful? Sometimes. But if you want to try it and can afford it, it’s low risk. You’re out a bit more money, but it’s got good bones.