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.