This post doesn’t exactly fit the normal theme of my blog, but over the past few weeks, several people have asked me about this, so I thought it was worth jotting down a few notes.
In January 2021, after eyeballing the specs and possibilities for the past few months, I splurged and ordered the Anova Precision Oven. I’ve owned it for over a year, now, and I use it a lot. But I wish it was quite a bit better.
There were a few main features of the APO that had me interested.
First, we have a really nice Wolf stove that came with our house. The range hood is wonderful, and the burners are great. The oven is also good when we actually need it (and we do still need it, sometimes; see below), but it’s propane, so there are a few drawbacks: it takes a while to heat up because there’s a smart safety feature that’s basically a glow plug that won’t let gas flow until it’s built up enough heat to ignite the gas, preventing a situation where the oven has an ideal gas-air mix and is ready to explode. It’s also big. And it uses propane (which I love for the burners, but is unnecessary (mostly) for the oven, and not only is it relatively expensive to run (we have a good price on electricity in Quebec because of past investments in giant hydro-electric projects), it measurably reduces the air quality in the house if the hood fan isn’t running (and running the fan in the dead of winter or summer cools/heats the house in opposition to our preference).
The second feature that had me really interested in the APO is the steam. I’ve tried and mostly-failed many times to get my big oven (this gas one and my previous electric oven) to act like a steam oven. Despite trying the tricks like a pan of water to act as a hydration reservoir, and spraying the walls with a mist of water, it never really steamed like I’d hoped—especially when making baguette.
I’m happy to say that the APO meets both of these needs very well: it’s pretty quick to heat up—mostly because it’s smaller; I do think it’s under-powered (see below)—and the steam works great.
There are, however, a bunch of things wrong with the APO.
The first thing I noticed, after unpacking it and setting it up the first time, is that it doesn’t fit a half sheet pan. It almost fits. I’m sure there was a design or logistics restriction (like maybe these things fit significantly more on a pallet or container when shipping), but sheet pans come in standard sizes, and it’s a real bummer that I not only can’t use the pans (and silicone mats) I already owned, but finding the right sized pan for the APO is also difficult (I bought some quarter and eighth sheet pans, but they don’t fill up the space very well).
Speaking of the pan: the oven comes with one. That one, however, was unusable. It’s made in such a way that it warps when it gets hot. Not just a little bit—a LOT. So much that if there happens to be liquid on the pan, it will launch that liquid off of the pan and onto the walls of the oven when the pan deforms abruptly. Even solids are problematic on the stock pan. I noticed other people complaining online about this and that they had Anova Support send them a new pan. I tried this. Support was great, but the pan they sent is unusable in a different way: they “solved” the warping problem by adding rigidity to the flat bottom part of the pan by pressing ribs into it. This makes the pan impossible to use for baking anything flat like bread or cookies.
I had to contact Support again a few months later when the water tank (the oven uses this for steam, but also even when steam mode is 0%, to improve the temperature reading by feeding some of the water to the thermometer, in order to read the “wet bulb” temperature). The tank didn’t leak, but the clear plastic cracked in quite a large pattern, threatening to dump several litres of water all over my kitchen at any moment. Support sent me a new tank without asking many questions. Hopefully the new one holds up; it hasn’t cracked yet, after ~3 months.
Let’s talk about the steam for a moment: it’s great. I can get a wonderful texture on my breads by cranking it up, and it’s perfect for reheating foods that are prone to drying out, such as mac & cheese—it’s even ideal to run a small amount of steam for reheating pizza that might be a day or two too old. I rarely use our microwave oven for anything non-liquid (melting butter, reheating soups), and the APO is a great alternative way to reheat leftovers (slower than the microwave, sure, but it doesn’t turn foods into rubber, so it’s worth trading time for texture).
So it’s good for breads? Well, sort of. The steam is great for the crust, definitely. However, it has a couple problems. I mentioned above that it’s under-powered, and what I mean by that is two-fold: it has a maximum temperature of 250°C (482°F), and takes quite a long time to recover from the door opening—like, 10 minutes long. Both of these are detrimental to making an ideal bread. I’d normally bake bread at a much higher temperature—I do 550°F in the big oven, and pizza even hotter (especially in the outdoor pizza oven which easily gets up to >800°F). 482°F is—at least in my casual reasoning—pretty bad for “oven spring”. My baguettes look (and taste) great, but they’re always a bit too flat. The crust forms, but the steam bubbles don’t expand quite fast enough to get the loaf to inflate how I’d like. The recovery time certainly doesn’t help with this, either. I’ve managed to mitigate the slow-reheat problem by stacking a bunch of my cast iron pans in the oven to act as a sort of thermal ballast, and help the oven recover more quickly.
Also on the subject of bread: the oven is great for proofing/rising yeast doughs. Well, mostly great. It does a good job of holding the oven a bit warmer than my sometimes-cold-in-winter kitchen, and even without turning on the steam, it seems to avoid drying out the rising dough. I say “mostly” because one of the oven’s fans turns on whenever the oven is “on”, even at low temperatures. The oven has a pretty strong convection fan which is great, but this one seems to be the fan that cools the electronics. I realize this is necessary when running the oven itself, but it’s pretty annoying for the kitchen to have a fairly-loud fan running for 24-48+ hours while baguette dough is rising at near-ambient temperatures.
The oven has several “modes” where you can turn on different heating elements inside the oven. The main element is the “rear” one, which requires convection, but there’s a lower-power bottom element that’s best for proofing, and a top burner that works acceptably (it’s much less powerful than my big gas oven, for example) for broiling. One huge drawback to the default rear+convection mode, though, is that the oven blows a LOT of bubbling liquid all over the place when it’s operating. This means that it gets really dirty, really quickly (see the back wall in the photo with the warped pan, above). Much faster than my big oven (even when running the convection fan over there). This isn’t the end of the world, but it can be annoying.
The oven has controls on the door, as well as an app that works over WiFi (locally, and even when remote). I normally don’t want my appliances to be in the Internet (see Internet-Optional Things), but the door controls are pretty rough. The speed-up/slow-down algorithm they use when holding the buttons for temperature changes is painful. It always overshoots or goes way too slow. They’ve improved this slightly, with a firmware update, but it’s still rough.
The app is a tiny bit better, but it has all of the problems you might expect from a platform-agnostic mobile app that’s clearly built on a questionable web framework. The UI is rough. It always defaults to the wrong mode for me (I rarely use the sous-vide mode), and doesn’t seem to allow things like realtime temperature changes without adding a “stage” and then telling the oven to go to that stage. It’s also dangerous: you can tell the app to turn the oven on, without any sort of “did one of the kids leave something that’s going to catch fire inside the oven” interlock. I’d much prefer (even as optional configuration) a mode where I’m required to open and close the door within 90 seconds of turning the oven on, or it will turn off, or something like that.
Speaking of firmware… one night last summer, while I was sitting outside doing some work, my partner sent me a message “did you just do something to the oven? it keeps making the sound like it’s just turned on.” I checked the app and sure enough, it just did a firmware update. I told her “it’s probably just restarted after the firmware update.” When I went inside a little while later, I could hear it making the “ready” chime over and over. Every 10-15 seconds or so. I didn’t realize this is what she’d meant. I tried everything to get it to stop, but it was in a reboot loop. We had to unplug it to save our sanity. Again, I looked online to see if others were having this issue, and sure enough, there were thousands of complaints about how everyone’s ovens were doing this same thing. Some people were about to cook dinner, others had been rising bread for cooking that night, but we all had unusable ovens. They’d just reboot over and over, thanks to a botched (and automatic!) firmware update. Anova fixed this by the next morning, but it was a good reminder that software is terrible, and maybe our appliances shouldn’t be on the Internet. (I’ve since put it back online because of the aforementioned door controls and the convenience of the—even substandard—app. I wish we could just use the door better, though.)
So, should you buy it? Well, I don’t know. Truthfully, I’m happy we have this in our house. It’s definitely become our main oven, and it fits well in our kitchen (it’s kind of big, but we had a part of the counter top that turned out perfect for this). It needs its own circuit, really, and is still underpowered at 120V (~1800W). However, I very very often feel like I paid a lot of money to beta test a product for Anova (it was around the same price as I paid for my whole slide-in stove (oven + burners, “range”), at the previous house), and that’s a bummer.
If they announce a Version 2 that fixes the problems, I’d definitely suggest getting that, or even V1 if you need it sooner, and are willing to deal with the drawbacks—I just wish you didn’t have to.