Speaking of air fryers...After a couple years of eyeing it, we finally bit the bullet and bought the
Breville Smart Oven Air a few months ago.
Yes it’s pricey compared to standalone air fryers. But holy crap it’s been the best money we’ve spent this year by far. We make probably 99% of the food we eat ourselves and we both work from home. So we’ve been using the Breville at virtually every meal, even when I’m BBQing. It’s definitely big, but we replaced our microwave with it. It comes with 1 airfry/dehydration basket, but you can buy additional baskets. The Smart Oven Air will hold up to 4 of them at a time.
It will bake, toast, broil, roast, proof, air fry, dehydrate, reheat, and keep stuff warm, and it does it all well. Very easy to use. We’ve only turned on our regular oven once or twice in the 4 months since we got the Smart Oven Air. Previously we’d be using the oven several times a week by this time in the fall. This Breville does so much more than a regular oven though. It can cook up to a 12 inch pizza and supposedly a 14lb turkey. Honestly I'm a little skeptical about the 14lbs number, but you should probably be able to do at least a 12 without too much finagling. I love it for reheating leftovers, as it leaves stuff with a nice baked or crispy texture, as opposed to the soggy grossness of a microwave. And it doesn’t heat up the whole house like a full size oven. No, I don’t work for Breville, but I can’t recommend this thing highly enough.
Set a camelcamelcamel alert for it and get one the next time it’s on sale. Btw, when amazon puts it on sale, the others seem to follow suit. We actually got ours from Crate and Barrel since they had it for the same $320 when Amazon did, and we had a C&B gift card.
Get one!
We also considered the Cuisinart TOA-60 as a cheaper alternative. There's also now an updated toa-65. Can’t promise it’s as awesome as the Breville, but it has decent reviews. I have no regrets at all about spending the extra for the Breville though, and we’re certainly not rolling in money here.
I will say, the few drawbacks we've found so far (if you replace your microwave with the Smart Oven Air) are:
- it takes up a lot of counter space
- it doesn't do well with reheating a bowl of soup or a cup of coffee/tea
- If you're often in a rush, it won't heat thing up super fast like a microwave
Now if someone made an over-the-range convection microwave that was capable of air-frying, toasting, and dehydrating...I would be all over that.