Customer Ratings & Reviews

This cafe product is so stinking pretty! Its easy to read the diaplay, easy to use and has ample of space inside. The glass door doesnt get hot to the touch on the outside while food is cooking. The toaster part could be a little better as it takes longer to toast a waffle than an actual toaster. There is the ability to connect to an app, but in the app, all you can do is set the prompt. You have to be at the air fryer to physically press start. You can hear when its running but its not too loud to where itll be annoying. And its just beautiful in my house to add! Its not perfect, but such an upgrade from my last air fryer. Oh! And dont let the white fool you. Theres some type of coating on the outside that makes it super easy to clean and less prone to staining. No stains yet!

I love this product. I have used it almost every night and cooks to perfection. It matches my Cafe appliances and looks so nice on the counter. It’s a little pricey but worth every penny.

Just perfect!! This replaces a toaster oven, air fryer and convection over in one appliance. We love the funish crisp feature. Perfect garlic bread every time.

The best part about this oven is the menu system which is easy to navigate. It Cooks things very fast so you have to keep an eye on your food. This is a real benefit of course. However if you're coming from a traditional air fryer which is what we got this for, it can be very challenging because it's difficult to clean up. This makes it using it much more of a decision. You can get similar items like this for half the price we have the complete matching Appliance set so this was the only real option for my wife. My only other real complaint is the fact that the two top aright knobs are plastic and flimsy, for this price they should have been metal and much more sturdy.

Great cooking performance and stunning looks. I knocked off one star because the text on the start and cancel buttons started disappearing after only a week. Start text is now gone completely. Otherwise we really like this product.

Simply Beautiful and Elegant. I own the CAFE espresso machine also. I fall in love with quality and looks.

GE Café Couture Smart Toaster Oven with Air Fry - Stainless Steel If your objective is to have the appearance of a gourmet, professional-looking kitchen, you’ve arrived. There can be no doubt with this stunning appliance sitting on a counter. After using the GE Café Couture for a good number of meal preparations, we know that this isn’t just about good looks. The Café thankfully also has a whole lot of features, functions and exceptional performance. There’s a lot to like here. SETUP and OPERATION: We prefer to plug in any of our newest appliances and be cooking in mere seconds. And so we did. This GE Café is thoughtfully intuitive. We turned the MODE DIAL and across the bright and easily read LED screen we could select from Air Fry, Bake, Broil, Roast, Toast, Bagel, Frozen Pizza, Cookies, Proof, Dehydrate, Slow Cook, Reheat, Keep Warm, and CrispFinish. Select your MODE. We chose BAKE, initially. Press the TEMP/TIME dial to toggle between each control. Once selected, turning the dial is either modifying the TIME or TEMPERATURE. So very easy. Adding a crispy finish, or melting cheese, etc is as easy as pressing the CRISP FINISH button (Lower right corner of DISPLAY.) The instructions, if you want details and guidance, are very well done with easily read, easily visible text size. (The COOKING MODES TABLE is too useful not to enlarge, laminate, and provide as the backside of a cook’s QUICK START). I’ll do that myself. (… but, think about it, GE.) There is a large cooking cavity heated with 6 halogen cooking tubes and the actual oven is pretty large. As you can see from my pictures, it looks right at home on any kitchen counter, but GE discourages placing this toaster oven under typical kitchen top cabinets with less than 4" clearance or on top of a surface that isn’t heat resistant. (“Ensure the oven has at least 4" (10cm) of clearance on all sides.”) External dimensions are 18.6" W x 14.0" H x 17.0" D Internal dimensions are 13.1" W x 5.0" H x 12.4" D Included: Oven rack, 12" enamel non-stick pizza pan, enamel non-stick coated baking pan, wire mesh air-fry/dehydrate basket, and removable crumb tray (at base of fryer). There’s a great cookbook of curated meals, desserts, and sides included, with helpful directions for this oven. You can watch your brightly lit food cook using the switch-controlled interior light. (Upper LEFT corner of display) There is a SmartHQ app which enable control some useful features using your phone connected to Wi-Fi or Google and Alexa. When connected to a WiFi network, you can adjust oven temperature, add or reduce cooking time, and/or stop a cooking cycle. While there is a way to START cooking remotely, I’m going to advise, don’t. [I started the process of setting up an account, getting verified, and ran out of patience at the “enter the oven password.” Wow. My bank is less secure. I’ll come back and finish. PERFORMANCE: 1- We needed to warm up some frozen rolls and microwaving is awful for this task. Getting quickly to a BAKE mode yielded a nicely warmed roll, ready for my tuna sandwich. I was tempted to add cheese and CRISP FINISH, but maybe next time. 2- Toasting another sliced-in-half roll resulted in nicely colored, evenly toasted halves. Perfect. We do that regularly, as you can see in the BAGEL TOAST picture. 3- Dinner tonight was bone-in pork chops. I prefer to start in a cast iron pan for a few minutes each side to seal in the juices. The GE Cafe was pre-heating to 375 degrees and was ready to finish my chops, which needed an 8 minutes bake or roasting to complete. Super well cooked, and no need to heat up our full-size oven. There has to be some energy savings here. We use the same technique on swordfish and tenderloin and this oven will make finishing them easier, with less energy. 4- French fries are the go-to test for the Air-Fryer. The AIR FRYER uses the built in fan and operates at a noise level of only 53dB. This is a quiet Air Fryer. You won’t be waking the baby with this one. Oh, and the fries were great. 5- Our test pizza was a dairy-free, high veggie count (artichoke/chicken/bacon) freshly made (uncooked) 12” specimen from a popular chain. This is a challenge for a home oven because it is wet, dense, and cooking needs vary from top to bottom. We followed the same directions as always, using the BAKE mode. 425 degrees, but a shorter than usual 16 minutes. We added 60 seconds CRISP at the very end. The results were perfect. We required probably 4 minutes less time than usual in our standard oven but this was a more even result with less fussing. This really worked out better and easier than we thought. 6- Compared to our previous Air Fryers there is an obvious difference related the size of the GE Café. This extra capacity allows for a broader, larger, repertoire of foods and meal sizes the can be prepared. And, as expected, some cooking speed is sacrificed. But very little. The convection fan is a great leveler. 7- I know there will comments about a rotisserie. Not from us. It’s a feature that invites reliability issues. More practically, we really don’t want to buy the smaller chickens necessary to use such a feature and we certainly hate the cleanup. It’s just our opinion. 8- The SmartHQ app is nice to have. Will we use it? We find cooking to be a hands-on experience. What makes the GE Café so much fun is the flexibility and intuitive changes-on-the-fly it offers and the big viewing window. While the App offers all that flexibility at a distance (even if from a patio or TV room 20 feet away) it frustrates the senses. So, unless GE is going to add a video camera to the cooking cavity, we won’t be using the App. SUMMARY: It would be silly to claim you have to spend this much money to achieve a high level of cooking performance. There are a number of really competent air fryer/ovens for your purchasing dollars. (We’ve owned a few). The GE Café Couture Smart Toaster Oven with Air Fry brings something special into your kitchen. It’s a whole ‘nother step above premium build quality and fun to show off. It could become the star of the kitchen (if we didn’t have a full size Monogram oven pair further down the counter). Performance must be perfection at this price and from we’ve witnessed, it sure is. Evenness of toasting is spot on. Convection (and related Air Frying) cooking is fast, predictable, repeatable and QUIET. The CRISP FINISH works great to get that extra brown crust on crab cakes or steaks frozen treats. It finishes off a pizza for picture perfect presentation. In our kitchen, the toaster over, air fryer combination is far and away the most used appliance. It has supplanted the microwave and cooktop. It had better do it all, and do it perfectly. We feel good about the GE Café Couture Smart Toaster Oven being in our kitchen. We recommend it highly.

Cafe air fryer is simply amazing and it is one of the best fryers I’ve used in a very long time everything from the design to the way it cooks food. It’s pretty amazing! All little food evenly cooks perfectly and there’s a new feature that can actually crisp up things further to your liking. This has been so good for french fries and fried chicken wings. I’m telling you this is one of the best air fryers I’ve used PERIOD! Setting up was easy once it’s out of the box you can plug it up and instantly get going if you like. There’s a quick start guide manual and warrantee that comes in a box but you don’t necessarily need the Quick start guide because most of the things are self-explanatory. There’s a nice little recipe book that’s really useful they provided. Just getting this out of the way; the most difficult part about setting this fryer up was using the app to Wi-Fi due to the nature that there was a firmware update. With the app, you must sign in with an account. The oven is huge but it looks beautifully designed. It just looks so nice on a countertop. The oven door pulls down with plenty of room for space and cleaning. I like the turning knob to the settings, allowing fast access to modes. Comes with a Baking pan, Pizza pan, Airfryer / dehydrate basket, and wire rack that you can place into the oven. As you can guess all works perfectly fine. My favorite so far of use is using the pizza pan because I can finally put a 12-inch pizza inside. The pizza simple comes out delicious on the pizza setting. In fact, most of the cooking modes were downright perfect with temperatures. I enjoyed cooking seasoned vegetables and potatoes; a tray big enough for a family. Cooking modes: Air fry Bake Broil Roast Reheat Warm Slow cook Dehydrate Proof cook Cookie Pizza Bagel Toast Crisp finish (exclusive) The crisp finish is a mode that allows for melting, caramelizing, or even browning the food. Given an extra crisp of pizzazz, you may add to the food. Perfect for chicken wings when you just want them crispy but not too much. The LED indicator on the front is nice and bright too. The oven itself does take a little while to preheat and it gives you a progress bar when it lets you know when it’s preheated. You can select preheat mode off. Preheating only works on Bake, Roast, and Cookie settings. The oven light is nice and bright inside. Cleaning the oven is as easy as well the crumb tray provides it is beneficial just pull it out and clean it.! SmartHQ app is good for what it does. It allows you to remote start the oven over Wifi. There are other features you can do inside the app like turn on the lights, control the lock, and set the mode of cooking. But you must sign in to use it. Overall I haven’t had any problems or troubleshooting with this Airfryer. It worked great! Super satisfied with the way the food cook and I wouldn’t hesitate to bet another one for a family member.

I had high expectations for the Café Air Fryer, given its $400 price tag and premium branding, but I am extremely disappointed in its performance and durability. After only one year of moderate use, the air fryer completely stopped working on December 31, 2024. To make matters worse, the warranty conveniently ended just four days earlier on December 25th—Christmas Day, a holiday when it’s impractical for customers to seek service or assistance. Adding insult to injury, my attempts to resolve this issue with Best Buy were met with nothing but runarounds and a lack of meaningful help. For such an expensive appliance, I expected much better customer service and reliability. The product itself, when it worked, performed decently, but that’s hardly worth anything if it fails so quickly. This experience has left me questioning the quality of GE’s products and their commitment to customer satisfaction. Shop with a company that stands behind their products and avoid Best Buy at all costs.

This GE product is just plain wonderful. The oven is very modern looking, and it fits well with my other stainless-steel kitchen appliances. To me, stainless-steel is always pleasing to the eye and always fits well with just about any type of style or kitchen you might have. One great feature of this appliance is having so many cooking modes as well as a good range of cooking temperatures. I'm sure that one of the 14 cooking modes will meet all of your cooking needs, such as baking, crisping, toasting, reheating, warming, and so on. One of my favorite foods is either frozen or homemade pizza. A 12-inch pizza easily fits into this appliance and the results were great. I tried a frozen pizza, and the results were terrific. It came out cooked to perfection, had great taste and was not burned. I love the fact that I don't need to use my full-size oven and my kitchen temperature stayed a lot cooler. This is a big plus since I reside in South Florida. One of our families' other favorite foods are French fries. The crisping and cooking of our fries were superb. Since the basket has a mesh build to it, the air circulated around the fries evenly which made for a very uniform cooking experience. I did take caution as to not overload and layer to many fries at one time thereby ensuring even cooking. The appliance cooks with numerous quartz heating elements. Heating up the oven is super quick and efficient. It has a bright digital display which is pretty good sized. For those older consumers, not having to wear a pair of glasses was very welcomed. This appliance does have a substantial footprint, so take caution as to the placement. Surfaces do get hot, so ensure you have the appropriate amount of ventilation and space when utilizing. Take note of your overhead kitchen cabinets to ensure you have enough room to prevent heat from transferring to them. This appliance has the capability of WIFI controlled cooking. As of the date and time of this review I did not use this function. That being said, I may eventually use this function and post an update to this review. Just having this capability is cool when you think about it though. A few thoughts on supplied baking tray, pizza tray and wire tray for air frying. The build and strength of the baking tray seems fine. It seems very sturdy. Wire basket tray for air frying seems to be on the flimsy side. I would have preferred the mesh to have been constructed on the thicker side. The reason that I am concerned with this is during the cleaning process. I wonder how many times one can put force on it with a steel wool pad before it starts to "bow". Finally, the baking tray for pizza is completely flat and lacks sides. I would have like to see the "build" of the pizza tray include a lip or sides around the outside of the tray. This is just my personal preference though. In closing, I'm loving this appliance. With its many capabilities, it easily replaced many of my counter-top appliances that I have such as my air fryer and stand-alone toaster oven. I experienced awesome performance, even and thorough cooking of my foods and great results.

Disappointed in ALL the Cafe appliances we have purchased (fridge, coffee machine, latte machine and this toaster oven). The letters and chrome starts to chip and fade almost immediately. The biggest issue we have had with this oven is the lining on the inside would not allow the door to properly close. This happened almost immediatly after purchasing. Also, 6 months later and it's starting to stain an ugly yellow color.

First, let me tell you that I’ve literally owned dozens of Air Fryers, toasters and ovens. Some I really liked. But once I got this GE Café Couture, everything before feels like kids’ toy to me. Set up was not complicated. It's plug and play, but if you want to use some of its smart features, you will need to spend some time to download the app and set it up there, then connect it to Wi-Fi, Google and Alexa. Don’t skip it because it’s worth it. Design looks fantastic. Nothing like the hundreds of other models out there. The copper toned dials and handle are very pleasing to the eyes and complements the oven color. The LCD screen is also very pretty; no colors, just white, but like everything else, it fits the whole clean, sleek, luxurious design. So much care in the details. We have already received lots of compliments on its look. But it’s not just looks that have impressed us. The Air Fry function meets or exceeds the best we’ve owned. One unexpected function that we tried and enjoyed was the proofing, which we used for a focaccia dough. After watching it triple the size, we moved it to a sheet and baked it. It worked amazingly well, crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. This was our first home made focaccia and it tasted just as good as the one in a fancy restaurant in town. I’ve added some pictures showing part of the process. CrispFinish is another very interesting feature, melting and caramelizing. This is also our first similar oven that keeps food warm and reheats, and it does it without burning or making it dry. Size is good for pizza – up to 12”, and the dehydrate function was put to use and we couldn’t be happier with the result. The only feature we haven’t tried yet is the slow cook but based on the excellent outcome of all other functions, I expect it to perform just as great. We love that we can turn on and off, control temperature, timer, and other programming features using our phones. Alexa and Google can also control it too. Having a lot of smart devices and lights controlled by those digital assistants, I am very happy that this oven integrates so well. You can just tell them what you want the oven to do, and voila. In summary, every single function exceeded our expectations. We tried to find anything that we didn’t like for this review, but we couldn’t. If I were to say something was missing, that would be a rotisserie, but the chicken we roasted came out so nice that I’m not sure a rotisserie would have made much, if any, difference. Luxurious look, very useful features, great performance, and smart. What else could I ask for? Ten out of five stars. That’s how we feel.

I have been exclusively using the Cafe Couture Toaster oven. It has temporarily replaced my oven and a couple air fryers. Pros: It is pretty simple to use once you peruse the instructions for a bit. looks really nice and comes with a good array of accessories. It is a good size to fit a good sized chicken to roast but doesn't take over the whole counter. Cons: It has a crumb catching tray that slides out at the bottom, but doesn't have a drip tray over the bottom heating rod so those can get dirty and they have this non removable wire protector that makes it annoying to clean. So now I just use the baking tray as a catch all when I'm using the Air Fry Basket accessory to limit this issue. Also I don't see a benefit of the SmartHQ app for this device. It requests way too much info to basically do the same things I can do straight at the device itself. From what I've gathered is that you can set presets for the cooking modes if you cook the same things consistently. Unless there is something I didn't see in the app, it doesn't even start on its own, you still need to hit the "Start" button. Overall its a great appliance, but it doesn't need to be a connected device to take full advantage of it.

High quality counter-top oven. Cafe is to GE as Lexus is to Toyota... The luxury brand of an excellent flagship company. This stove-top oven fits that description perfectly. First off, what does it do? *Air Fry *CrispFinish *Bake *Broil *Roast *Toast *Bagel *Pizza *Cookies *Proof *Dehydrate *Slow Cook *Keep Warm *Reheat After doing several tests ranging from frozen pizza, to bagels and toast and air-frying vegi's, this unit mastered all. The one caveat (and I have seen a couple other reviewers not the same), you may need to experiment with the time. While I am at 6500 feet above sea level, not sure if that makes my experience unique, but frozen items (tater-tot's and pizza's) seemed to cook rather quickly. A pizza that said 15 to19 minutes was easily done at 13 to 14. Just takes some experimenting. The CrispFinish feature is pretty cool. It does exactly as it say's... Offers a, well, crisp finish. Great for pizza's, sandwiches etc. While it does have WiFi capabilities, not really that useful. I understand why t is designed as it is, but it seems like a marketing tool more than a useful device. In all, a very nice, gorgeous, functional luxury item. I would recommend to a friend.

I'm no chef so I'm reviewing this from a parents perspective. It's hard to take time to cook full meals while taking care of my energetic 2 and 3 year old. The Cafe Couture Toaster Oven has solved that problem almost completely. I'm able to easily throw in all of my kids favorites such as chicken tenders, french fries, pizza rolls, full pizzas, bagels, the list goes on and on! Within minutes their food is cooked to perfection. There's so many different cooking modes (14) that allow you to make a wide variety of dishes. With the Smart HQ app, I'm able to remotely adjust the cooking time, temperature, and turn the oven off/on. You can also connect your Toaster oven to your Amazon Alexa or Google Home devices to control it with your voice. This is the ultimate all-in-one countertop oven and it looks so elegant in my kitchen. It's extremely easy to use and I love the large capacity, making it simple to make plenty of food for the whole family at once. I especially love the crisp finish setting, right after my food finishes I set it to crisp for 1-2 minutes and it's perfectly crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. This setting is essential for my french fries. The Cafe Couture Toaster Oven does it all, from breakfast to dinner and every snack in between. It makes for the perfect addition to any kitchen.

This amazing toaster oven has managed to let us take back some of our counter space while not having us compromise on cooking functions. It has a gorgeous design that will look great in most kitchens, the smart feature is something that I didn’t think I would use until I did, and it does a great job at making meal prep/cooking a breeze. Setup what mainly frictionless, plug it in, download the app and follow the instructions to get it up and running on the Wi-Fi. I mistakenly tried to set it up as an over instead of a countertop appliance, but once I figured that out it was easy to setup. The smart features allow you to check cooking time, temperature, cooking modes. So, if you left something cooking but had to step away you can check on the oven, even turn it off or set it to warming mode. We’ve used the oven for reheating, toasting, making pizza, and air frying, and cooking a few different sides/meals. Each time it was incredibly to setup and make sure that the food came out perfectly. We used to have an air fryer and countertop oven, but we gave away those two appliances and started using this one. We kept all the functions from the other two appliances, and added some, while freeing up more counterspace. This is such a great device. It might help you consolidate a few different appliances down, you can make perfect toast, delicious wings, reheat leftovers, use it as a warming oven, etc. If the food fits in the oven, the baking sheet, grill, air fry basket, and pizza pan will make it easy to cook what you want. It also has a crumb tray at the bottom of the oven to make it easy to clean up. The smart features are a great bonus and makes it easy to keep managing your cooking if you need to step out of the kitchen. An easy recommendation for anyone.

This oven is probably the best thing to happen to my kitchen since my SmartHub fridge. Firstly, it looks absolutely gorgeous on the countertop. Secondly, it efficiently made extra space on my countertop as it replaced my toaster, toaster oven and my air fryer ---- and does the job better and faster even! The cooking cavity is enormous and it comes with an air frying basket, a cooking rack, a round pizza tray, and a square tray for cooking and catching food from the basket and the rack. It also has the removable crumb tray on the bottom. The settings are endless ---- it has bake, broil, pizza, roast, toast, you name it. You can set your timer and temperature from the app even, which is pretty awesome and resourceful. The first fries I air fryed in this oven I burned because it cooked them soo much faster than my previous air fryer, so that's something good to get use to. It is basically a one stop shop for everything I am not cooking on the stove, so my kitchen is much less crowded. The only only con I would assign to this oven is that it does not have the rotisserie function which I would expect from a toaster oven/air fryer device of this size. Nonetheless you can effectively roast a chicken in this oven if you wanted to, so all in all, I'd say this oven is worth every penny.

The Couture Oven is my second smart countertop kitchen appliance from Café, and I really like it a lot. It has an upscale brushed stainless-steel finish with modern copper accented dials and door handle, and a large, bright LCD. The chunky feet in each corner elevate it off the counter about ½” with enough room underneath to store the included pizza pan. They also allow the handle of the door to float just above your countertop when the door is opened, rather than smacking into it. Inside, there are three rack levels where you can utilize the included baking tray, wire rack, or 1” deep air fry basket. The Couture takes up a decent amount of counter space at 14” tall, 17” deep and 18.5” wide. It also requires 4” of clearance at the back, sides, and top for ventilation, as these surfaces can get very hot, so you’ll need to budget for that when calculating space requirements. The trade-off is that you do get plenty of interior space, approximately 13” W, 5”H, and 12.5” D. That’s large enough to a fit a whole 12” pizza, quarter baking sheet, or 12” dual-handle cast iron pan. The unit has four top and two bottom quartz heating elements that are loosely guarded by wire cages, though these will not prevent drips and spatters of food or liquid from landing on the elements. For this reason, I prefer to keep the baking tray in the lowest position as a drip tray, when possible, so long as it doesn’t impede the distribution of heat for my intended cooking activity. I also like that the wire rack has built-in feet on the bottom, so you can remove it from the oven to use as a cooling rack for your food as well. The included recipe book has a handful of delicious sounding recipes you can try, accompanied by appetizing photos. The oven has 14 customizable modes: Air Fry, Bake, Broil, Roast, Reheat, Warm, Slow Cook, Dehydrate, Proof, Cookies, Pizza, Bagel, Toast, and Crisp Finish. Each mode has a range of times and temperatures to choose from, appropriate for that cooking method, for example, Air Fry lets you select from 200°F to 450°F and 1 minute up to an hour, while proof narrows the selection to 90°F to 200°F but you can run it for up to 24 hours. Select modes allow you to toggle convection on/off including Bake, Roast, Reheat, and Pizza, while other modes will always use convection, e.g. Air Fry, Slow Cook, and Bagel, or disable convection when it is not needed like for Warm, Proof, and Toast. Adjusting the time and temp require turning the right-most dial, and the values do not loop if you try to turn past the min or max settings. To switch between time and temp you simply press the dial in, and to begin cooking, you’ll need to press the separate ‘Start’ button. Most modes will preheat first which takes about 10 minutes. Once preheated, the oven will beep to prompt you to place the food inside. If you don’t hear the beep, just check the progress bar, which will be full when it’s ready. You’ll need to press ‘Start’ again within 10 minutes of preheating in order to begin the timer countdown. If you miss this window, the oven will automatically shut off. You can disable preheating in the settings menu or simply press ‘Start’ again at any time during preheating to skip it and start the timer immediately. The one function that this oven doesn’t have, that I use every so often, is rotisserie for cooking a whole chicken. However, I found I can achieve similar results using the Air Fry or Roast modes (with convection), as long as I turn the bird over halfway through cooking and once more at the end before using Crisp Finish. The Crisp Finish function is a one-touch button that you press next to the LCD, rather than using the mode dial, though you can adjust the time and temperature just like with any other mode. Many of the modes are interchangeable and overlap in functionality, so for example, you can use the Bake mode in lieu of Cookies to make cookies, as long as you are able to select the same settings. The nice thing about having the separate modes though is that the machine will remember the time and temp selections that you used most recently for each mode. If you always want to reheat your food at 250°F for 5 minutes, then you just turn the dial to Reheat, and those settings will already be selected. This gives you potentially 14 different pre-sets you can have ready-to-go for your favorite foods. During cooking, you can change the selected time and temp on-the-fly by simply turning the time/temp dial and selecting new values. You will not have to start/stop cooking to add or reduce time or temperature. Also, when you open the oven door during cooking, this will pause the timer until you close the door again (within 10 minutes), allowing you to check its doneness, add ingredients, or stir your food without losing any time. When the cook time runs out, the oven will automatically shut off the heating elements and go into standby after a brief 2 minute cool down. The first thing I made in this oven was pumpkin muffins, as I wanted to make a half-dozen batch without needing to turn on my big oven. I choose to bake without convection following the recipe’s directions, then toggled on convection at the last few minutes to achieve evenly browned, lightly toasted tops. The nice part was that I didn’t need to turn/rotate the tray during baking, and there were no hot zones that caused any of the muffins to cook or brown more quickly than the others. It also performed well in a variety of cooking applications from roasting vegetables, melting cheese, and broiling salmon, to gently reheating leftovers without drying them out. This unit is ideal for crisping up frozen fried foods too such as French fries, onion rings, and tater tots in the mesh air fryer basket. The results were delightfully crispy exteriors with hot, tender interiors, and I liked that you don’t need to stir or shake the contents of the basket, if you cook everything in 1 even layer (don’t stack!). The dedicated pizza mode also worked great for frozen pizza, however, I haven’t yet tried to make one from scratch in this mode. The thing that makes this oven “smart” is the ability to connect it to your WiFi network and monitor and control cooking using the GE Smart HQ app. Setup takes only a few minutes, and the password for the appliance’s WiFi network is printed on a sticker on the back of the unit. For safety reasons, the oven can only be started remotely after pressing and holding the ‘Start’ button on the front of the machine for 3 seconds. You’ll have 10 minutes to choose the settings and start the machine from you mobile device before this ability expires. That makes sense since you don’t want to start the oven if you don’t know whether or not it’s safe to do so, however, this limits the situations in which this might actually be useful. However, regardless of whether you started the oven remotely or manually, you can change the time and temp or cancel cooking using the app at any time. Changing the setting at the machine automatically updates in the app after a few seconds as well. Note though that if you try to change the cooking mode remotely, cooking will be cancelled, and you’ll need to start the machine again manually. The only other feature I think would have been nice would have been an automatic keep warm option following cooking. You can, of course, simply use the ‘Warm’ mode after cooking, but it needs to be manually started. I like that the crumb tray at the bottom under the glass door is easily removed from the outside of the machine for cleaning and hand washing. All other removable accessories are dishwasher safe. Overall, the Couture Oven does a very nice job cooking a variety of foods with fast preheating, accurate temperature control, and consistent evenness. I can accomplish many tasks with just one appliance like dehydrating fruits and vegetables, proofing dough, and toasting bread/bagels and use less energy for cooking in small batches when I don’t need to turn on my full-size oven. While the smart remote control feature is nice to have, its practicality is somewhat limited.

I'll be honest, when I first received this counter top oven, I was skepical. For reference, I've been using a GE 6 slice quartz toaster oven for a year and a half, and it's been great. I wasn't sure how big of an upgrade the Cafe Couture Oven woud be, but it definitely has some intriguing features that piqued my interest. There are 14 features, and while I haven't use them all, the ones that I have used have all worked out well. I've used my current toaster oven a lot, not just for toast and bagels, but as a replacement for my full sized oven. I usually cook for 1 or 2 people, so using a large oven is overkill. One of the few things I use my reguar oven for is yeasted bread, so I was eager to try out the proofing function on this oven. I placed an oiled loaf on the roasting pan and used the preset program of 85 degrees and one hour. At 35 minutes the loaf had doubled in size, so I was able to to punch down the loaf and form it for the pan. It definitely shortened the rise time. I used the bake setting to bake the loaf, and while it didn't turn out as well as it does in my full sized oven, I'm not sure if that might not have been operator error. I also tested the pizza function with a Red Baron frozen pizza. I followed package directions, but it was fully cooked and browned within 8 minutes. When you're learning to use this, make sure you are staying close to monitor your food. It takes much less time to cook than you are used to. I've used the toast and roast functions, and both turned out well, but these are features that you will find on most ovens, so it doesn't seem necessary to go into a ton of detail-- it's toast. Two things to be aware of: The size and the smart functionality. This oven is huge. It takes up a lot of real estate on your counter, so if you have a small kitchen this might not be the right countertop oven for you. The second is the utter uselessness of the smart function. You can control the oven from the app or with a smart speaker, but you have to press and hold the start button for three seconds before you are allowed to control the oven remotely, and then you must start the oven within 10 minutes. I understand this is for safety, but if you want to start preheating the oven while you're in the living room watching tv or when you're on your way home from work, you won't be able to do it with this oven. I'm not really sure what purpose the app serves. Overall, I'm really happy with this oven. Unless I'm cooking for a crowd, this will replace my full sized oven.

The Cafe - Couture Smart Toaster Oven could probably use a better name. It's a highly featured oven on your counter. It would be selling short to just call it a toaster oven. This is a stylish appliance which fits in well with current trends of copper accents and the traditional style of stainless steel. Now, don't forget to look at the dimensions of the oven, it's a good bit larger than a normal toaster oven, big enough to make a dozen cookies comfortably. Although a little on the pricey side, this oven is a hit for cooking without having to heat up your full-size oven. So, why four instead of five stars? Cleaning the unit is a bit of a challenge, especially if you cook anything which might pop or splatter grease or oil onto the cooking rods. There is a convenient crumb tray which slides out from the bottom of the unit, but if cooking anything messier than toast, it's a bit more work. Still, the benefits of this tidy solution outweigh the few extra minutes of occasional wipe down it's going to cost you.