The Tovala Oven Pro Can Help You Prepare Quality Meals, Even If You Hate to Cook

Not everyone loves to cook or is good at it. I fall into both categories. Yet, I appreciate a good meal. That’s where the Tovala Oven Pro comes in handy. This is a countertop kitchen appliance that’s truly smart. In fact, it’s six devices in one, so it’s able to air fry, steam, bake, broil, reheat, or toast. But that’s not what makes this oven special. You can either sign up for a meal service, have meals delivered to your home, and then use the oven to prepare them, or use your own supermarket bought ingredients to prepare meals with ease.

In addition to being a “smart” oven that communicates with the Tovola app running on a smartphone, this oven has an integrated barcode reader. If you subscribe to the Tovala meal service, you simply turn on the oven, scan the meal’s barcode, and place it into the oven. The Tovala automatically identifies the meal, adjusts the oven settings, and prepares that meal. The oven and mobile app alerts you when the meal is ready to eat. 

Tovala Oven Pro Smart Oven

Visit Amazon Free with Meal Plan Subscription from Tovala

But what if you don’t want to subscribe to the Tovala meal service? Well, the Tovala Oven Pro is still extremely useful. Integrated into the Tovala app are hundreds of recipes for easy-to-prepare meals. Choose what you want, buy the ingredients from your favorite supermarket, and scan the code associated with that recipe. Once again, the oven does the rest. In fact, Tovala can even identify the barcode for thousands of supermarket purchased, prepacked foods. When you scan an item’s barcode, the oven adjusts itself and prepares that food perfectly. This works particularly well with frozen food items.

The folks at Tovola recently provided me with a review unit of the Tovola Oven Pro and several Tovala meals (dinners). After my hands-on testing, what I liked most about this smart oven is how easy it is to operate. The smartphone app communicates with the oven and does most of the work for you. Keep reading to learn more about the newly upgraded Tovala Oven Pro, and how it can become a relied upon piece of smart cooking gear in your own kitchen.

Here’s What the Tovala Oven Pro Can Do

Using a traditional oven to prepare food, it’s all about setting the proper temperature and choosing the ideal amount of time to cook the food. A miscalculation can easily lead to an overcooked or undercooked meal. The Tovala Oven Pro takes the guesswork out of meal preparation, regardless of whether you choose to use it as an air fryer, to bake, steam, broil, reheat, or toast your food. That’s the beauty of a “smart” oven.  Once your smartphone communicates to the oven what foods you’re preparing, the oven basically does the rest.

The easiest way to use this oven is to subscribe to the Tovala meal service. The meal plan features one or two serving meal options, and requires a subscription that includes a minimum of four meals per week (but you can select up to 16 meals per shipment). The cost of each single serving meal is between $9.99 and $12.99. There’s also a $10.99 shipping charge per shipment. Once the meals arrive, because they use fresh ingredients, they should be consumed that same week.

What’s nice is that there are at least 40 meal options to choose from each week via the meal plan, and the offerings are constantly changing. It’s also possible to select from meals that are GLP-1 balanced, high protein, vegetarian, adhere to a Mediterranean diet, that are gluten friendly, that offer low (or zero) carbs, that are low calorie, or that have low sodium. If you’re willing to sign up for the meal service, and then order meals at least six times during a six month period, Tavola will provide you with the Tavola Oven Pro for free. You can sign up for this deal directly from Tavola’s website.

Every meal you receive from this service has a QR code associated with it. Use the oven’s barcode/QR reader to scan that meal’s code, and the oven does the rest. And since the meal comes in one or two aluminum foil cooking containers, there’s less than 15 seconds of meal preparation and cleanup is a breeze. 

However, if you choose to skip the Tovola meal plan, the Tovala smartphone app features an ever-expanding library of free recipes. Select the recipe you want, gather the listed ingredients from a supermarket, place them as directed within the oven and scan the QR associated with that recipe that’s displayed within the app. Again, the oven does the rest. 

Yet another option is to purchase prepackaged foods from a supermarket, such as a frozen pizza. The oven can read and understand the barcodes for more than 1,000 prepackaged foods from popular brands, like Trader Joe’s, Hot Pockets, Eggo, Pillsbury, DiGiorno, Lean Cuisine, California Pizza Kitchen, and Kashi, and then automatically adjust the oven settings and does the cooking for you.

Using the Tovala Oven Pro with Your Own Ingredients

There are so many ways to use the Tovola Oven Pro, that you’ll never run out of meals or recipes to experience. Even when using your own ingredients, meal prep is fast, the cooking process typically takes less than 30 minutes, and the oven ensures everything is properly prepared. To test this out, I tried the BBQ Chicken Breast with Corn on the Cob recipe (for two people) using ingredients I purchased at my local market. 

I followed the directions offered by the smartphone app to lay out each item on the oven’s aluminum foil covered sheet tray. Next, I tapped the Cook button in the app that was associated with the recipe. About 20 minutes later, the meal was done and it was delicious. The best thing about this meal prep approach is that zero cooking skill is required. 

During this cooking process, while the chicken and corn were cooking, there was a lot of splatter inside the oven that needed to be cleaned after the meal was cooked. The sheet tray stayed clean, because it was covered with aluminum foil, which greatly reduced cleanup time. That said, cleaning the inside of the oven gets tricky, since some areas are easier to reach than others, based on the position of the heating coils, for example. 

One thing I noticed is that when following one of the recipes offered by the app and using my own ingredients, it’s essential to use the food portion sizes listed in the recipe to ensure proper cooking time. In this case, the recipe called for a six ounce skinless chicken breast, and that’s what the app programmed the oven to prepare. If the size of the chicken breast is larger or smaller, it may not cook properly. In other words, stick with the recipe item portion sizes, but you can improvise a bit when it comes to seasoning the chicken with the black pepper and kosher salt, for example, that was called for within the recipe. And you can use whatever brand of BBQ sauce you like.

Who Will the Tovala Oven Pro Appeal To?

Because the Tovala Oven Pro takes most of the guesswork out of food preparation, especially when cooking a meal from the Tovala meal service (or when following a recipe from the app), I’d recommend this smart oven to people who don’t know how to cook, as well as people who live alone or couples. The meal subscription service is a bit on the high-priced side, considering the size of the portions, but you’re paying for convenience.

That said, the oven can save you money if you use your own ingredients. However, when following a recipe, you cannot change the number of servings it’s designed to prepare. Many of the recipes are for one serving size, but there are some that are for two or more servings. On the plus side, there are multiple ways to browse the more than 1,000 recipes at your disposal. For example, you can browse by main ingredient (chicken, seafood, baked goods, eggs, vegetables, pork, pasta, etc.), or sort the recipes by meal type (dinner, breakfast, sandwiches, desserts, etc.).

Using the Tovala Oven Pro with the Tovala Meal Plan

If you’re using pre-packed meals from the Tovola meal plan, up to four of the same meal can be prepared at once. Or, when using your own ingredients, you can add enough food for multiple people. Based on my testing, the oven is best suited for preparing meals for one or two people at a time. The meals that get shipped to your door include fresh ingredients, so you should plan to consume them within a week.

After preparing and tasting several meals from the Tovola plan, I found the taste was at times bland and the portions were typically small. Much of the flavor comes from packets of sauce that come with the meals. Also, depending on the meal, there may be several preparation steps before placing the container(s) in the oven after removing their covers, but these steps are outlined and simple to follow. The meals include pre-portioned ingredients. I found the food quality to be a step or two up from a generic frozen dinner, but not up to restaurant quality. 

While preparing recipes using my own ingredients sometimes created a real mess within the oven that took time to clean, because the Tovala meals come in the aluminum foil containers, they make very little mess. And if you cover the tray with aluminum foil, the clean up process is even faster. That said, there’s a lot of packaging for each meal that needs to be thrown out or recycled.

Perhaps the easiest way to use this oven is to cook prepackaged food. I tried this with several items, including a frozen DiGiorno Personal Size Four Cheese Stuffed Pizza. After scanning the barcode on the outside of the box, the oven adjusted its settings to what the pizza box’s directions listed for someone using a traditional oven or toaster oven and the results were consistently the same. Again, the Tovala Oven Pro offers convenience, but in this case, does not speed up the cooking process.

Keep the Tovala Oven Clean and Ready to Use

To ensure the oven continues to operate correctly, it’s important to keep it clean and maintained. The inside and outside of the oven should be cleaned after each use, but never use oven cleaner or a metal scouring pad. Instead, use a soft cloth with a solution of mild soap and water. The air fry basket, metal crumb tray (at the bottom of the oven), and the plastic drain tray (below the oven) are not dishwasher safe. These pieces need to be cleaned by hand. This is all rather straightforward, but how long it takes depends on the amount of slatter generated by the food while it was cooking.

Keep in mind that Tovala recommends following its descaling (deep clean) procedure outlined on the company’s website at least every six months, or more frequently if you live in an area with hard water. Among other steps, this procedure requires running the oven (while empty) for five minutes on Bake, and 25 minutes on Steam (with the oven’s water reservoir filled with at least eight ounces of tap water). Not properly cleaning the oven will cause it to smell, even when it’s not in use.

My Final Thoughts: Is the Tovala Smart Oven Worth It?

Is the Tovala Oven Pro a magical food preparation device like something you’d find in science fiction? Hardly. As a smart oven, it relies on the smartphone app and barcode/QR scans to help the oven determine the proper settings to prepare specific types of food. This makes cooking meals easier with less meal prep than you’d experience using a traditional oven, steamer, or air fryer, for example.

After having prepared a bunch of meals — from the Tovala subscription meal plan, using my own ingredients, and scanning the barcode found on prepacked foods — I found the Tovala Oven Pro is easy to operate, and worth the investment, especially for someone who doesn’t love to cook. My biggest complaint is that while the subscription-based meal plan allows for easy preparation, cooking, and cleanup, the meals are on the expensive side, taste okay (not mouthwatering), and the portions are on the smaller side. So, if you have a hardy appetite, consider preparing two servings for yourself.

Tovala Oven Pro Smart Oven

Visit Amazon Free with Meal Plan Subscription from Tovala

It’s a lot more economical to use your own ingredients to prepare meals by following recipes offered within the app, or manually setting the oven’s settings based on the type of food you want to prepare. The oven itself is fairly priced and well made. The company also did an impressive job designing the mobile app, and making sure it works seamlessly with the oven.