Breville’s Smallest, Cheapest Air Fryer Oven Is Smart, but Uneven

I love me a Breville smart oven. Ever since I began testing toaster ovens for a living, the ovens from Breville have been at the top of our rankings. At the highest end of the Aussie appliance line, the flagship Joule (8/10, WIRED Recommends) and the almost-equivalent Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro can make you forget you even have a full-sized oven.

This sounds like hyperbole, but isn’t. Breville’s highest-end countertop ovens are far more precise in temperature, preheat faster, don’t toast the whole house when you just want to roast some potatoes, and quite simply do more things better. What’s more, Breville’s takeover of the ChefSteps brand, and partnerships with other recipe makers, mean the phone app offers a huge repertoire of tested recipes and techniques for your countertop cookers.

But the air fryer capability of each Breville device has never been as impressive as the ovens’ other many good qualities. They don’t tend to crisp up a wing like my top-pick Instant Pot basket fryer, or even the little Cuisinart TOA-70 oven, which seems to add a light crispness to kinda everything. I always wondered whether the much larger size of each Breville oven’s interior didn’t allow air to whip around well enough, the way it does in a little basket air fryer that’s basically a single-purpose catch-basin for hot air. If Breville made a smaller oven air fryer, I figured, the basket could get better circulation.

Enter the Smart Oven Air Fryer Compact, Breville’s smallest and lowest-cost air fryer model yet. The company began rolling the device out softly at the beginning of March. The 1,800-watt Compact is a good oven overall, with a number of very smart features, especially on the preset front. I don’t often like preset buttons for individual dishes, but I actually kinda love them here. The Compact is also versatile for its size, with three (or really kinda six) rack positions, an air fryer basket, a roasting pan that doubles as a grease catcher, and a broiler rack.

But size didn’t turn out to be the answer when it came to crispy fries and wings.

Smart Oven, Smart Features

First off, here’s what’s great about the Smart Oven Air Fryer Compact. Across its appliance line, Breville has made an art out of the elegant hand-hold, little smart bits of automation, and convenience that offer genuine utility to home cooks. This compact air fryer oven is no different.

The air fryer presets are the exact three things that an American audience will most often want in an air fryer oven preset: wings, fries, bacon. These are the food of the Rust Belt and the Midwest, of plains states and football fans. This is air fryer country. The correct rack position for each preset is helpfully marked on the interior of the oven, but especially what’s helpful is the customization of each dish.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage