Anova Precision Oven (2026) review: steam that earns its counter space, software that does not

Nine weeks with a countertop steam oven, most of it spent working out which of its many modes are genuinely better than an ordinary oven and which are a novelty.

Most countertop ovens are small ovens. This one is a small oven with a steam generator attached, and that single addition is either the reason to buy it or completely irrelevant to you. Nine weeks of use did not blur that line at all — it sharpened it.

What humidity control actually changes

Conventional ovens dry things out. That is not a flaw so much as physics: hot air moving over food removes moisture. Most oven cooking is a negotiation with that fact.

Controlling humidity independently of temperature removes the negotiation, and four things improve immediately.

Bread. Steam during the first phase of baking keeps the crust flexible while the loaf expands, then dry heat sets and browns it. This is what commercial deck ovens do and what home bakers approximate with ice cubes and roasting pans. Doing it as a setting rather than a trick is the single clearest improvement here, and the crust it produces is not achievable in a domestic oven by any amount of technique.

Low-temperature proteins. Setting a steam temperature and a target core temperature produces sous-vide results without the bath or the bags. A chicken breast comes out evenly cooked edge to edge. It is slower to preheat than a circulator in a small volume and it is far more pleasant to live with.

Custards and eggs. No water bath, no cracked cheesecake, no rubber at the edges.

Reheating. Underrated and the thing we used most. Steam-reheated leftovers come back as food rather than as a microwave approximation of food. After nine weeks this alone had changed how we handled leftovers.

What is mediocre

The app. Slow to open, occasionally cannot find the oven on the network, and required for saved programmes, multi-stage cooks and firmware. The front panel is fine for direct cooking, which is most cooking, but anything beyond that routes through software that feels like it was finished to a deadline. At this price that is a legitimate complaint.

Capacity. The exterior takes serious counter space; the interior fits less than you expect. A large chicken is a tight fit. Two trays of anything is optimistic.

Descaling. Real maintenance on a real schedule — every six to eight weeks with regular steam use and hard water. Filtered water in the reservoir extends it noticeably.

Accuracy

Across the test window, temperature held within a couple of degrees of setpoint, verified against an independent probe. Steam percentage behaved consistently. For an appliance whose entire proposition is precision, it delivers precision, and that is not a given in this category.

The verdict

7.8/10. A genuinely capable appliance held back by software and by a value proposition that only works for a specific cook.

Buy it if you bake bread, cook proteins low and slow, or make custards — the steam is not a gimmick and no conventional oven does it. Do not buy it as a general second oven with bonus features, because you will use it as a small convection oven and the price will feel absurd.

The test we would apply: have you baked bread or cooked sous vide in the last six months? If yes, this is one of the more transformative appliances available. If no, it will sit on the counter being expensive.