Tovala is the only meal kit I know of that comes with its own oven—and I speak as someone who has tested a lot of meal kits and also ovens. Still, the idea isn’t merely wacky. The biggest pitfall of pre-prepared meal delivery is almost always the microwave, as I noted in my review of HelloFresh’s often delicious but sometimes soggy Factor meals. These almost always benefited from an improvised turn in the air fryer.
And so the brainstorm on Tovala is both sophisticated and simple. Make mostly pre-prepped meals designed for a specific smart oven—an oven that’s able to move itself through a number of pre-programmed cooking modes (steam! convection bake! broil!) to get the desired result. Tovala’s smart oven acts like a robot chef for quite specific meals.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
The results are nifty, actually. A red-wine braised filet mignon came out juicy and pink next to a little dollop of creamy mashed potatoes. It’s a discount steakhouse in a box. A “tandoori-spiced” chicken and chickpea salad tasted bright and delicious, with a drizzle of mint chutney. An almond-dusted meat and quinoa bowl was drizzled with cilantro chimichurri and topped with almonds. Each required no more than three minutes of prep, plus a turn in the oven.
In a prepared-meal world filled with rubber chicken and soggy veg, these solo meals are maybe a little miracle. Though, emphasis is needed on “little.” These meals aren’t big, made for one and rarely topping 600 calories. A week’s box of meals arrives in a tight brickwork of neatly stacked, cool-packed cardboard boxes. And each meal costs $13, less than DoorDash but significantly more than TV dinners or scratch cooking.
The Tovala meal kit fills an interesting but well-occupied niche. It’s best for the solo home diner who doesn’t want to resign themselves to the microwave, but who for whatever reason doesn’t have the time, mental space, inclination, or ability to cook meals with more demanding prep.
An Oven With Your Chicken Parm
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Tovala isn’t just a meal kit, of course. It’s also an oven, and that’s where things get interesting. You get your choice of two ovens: a lower-cost oven with a high-speed air fryer fan, and a more advanced “Pro” model with steam cooking capabilities. The higher-end, steam-cooker Pro is the oven I tested. You can buy the Pro on Amazon separately for north of $300, but if you commit to six weeks of meal plan, it’s yours for $119. Tovala has placed its chips on lifestyle, and the notion that you’ll like its meals long enough to stick around.
This is perhaps a smart play. These pre-programmed, mostly pre-prepped meals are a unique feature for the Tovala—something not found elsewhere on the market. You sign up for a certain number of meals a week, anywhere from four to 16 total meals, which will arrive packed into a weekly cool-packed box. The menu for each week offers a choice of 35 or more options a week, with few vegetarian options but a fair number of “gluten-friendly” and high-protein meals.
But you also must choose an oven, which in my case arrived four days before the meals. The oven doesn’t come with an obligation to keep it—you can return within 100 days, if it doesn’t agree with you—but to get the steep discount, you’ll have to stick with six weeks of meal plan. Otherwise, you either pay full price or return the oven.
The sell on the Tovala meals is ease, without compromising texture. They’re easy enough to prep that I wouldn’t really consider it cooking. It’s mostly a matter of arranging a few ingredients between two aluminum trays. I sliced a few peppers for a cilantro chimichurri bowl, but otherwise, the only knife I used across six meals was the one I used to cut my filet mignon after it was cooked.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
The oven boasts a little QR- and barcode scanner like the ones at the supermarket. Use it to scan the recipe card, and the oven pretty much does the rest, often cycling through the same little trio of functions: steam, convection bake, then a little broil to brown the top. It’s a simple trick, but it’s a good one. Most meals take less than 2 minutes to prep, and less than 20 to cook.
I wouldn’t call the meals overly complex or layered, but they were surprisingly worldly and varied, ranging from a sweet chili-glazed salmon with pickled veg and noodles, to a credible red-sauce Italian chicken parm. A globe-compressing “spanikopita quesadilla” folded spinach, tzatziki, and feta into a tortilla: This last was both tasty and a little dinky, and I’d have appreciated a small side.
Tovala, like most prepared meal kits, doesn’t generally offer huge portions—and yet a lot of that good taste can come in the form of a fair amount of sodium and saturated fat. A few meals, all by themselves, take up two-thirds of the recommended daily salt allowance for an adult.
The sodium intake is striking in part because older adults, living alone, seem a natural fit for what Tovala offers: hearty and delicious meals in an oven, without a lot of effortful prep. Those with disabilities that might make cooking difficult seem another natural audience. That said, it’s just as easy to picture a young person with a busy career and little time for cooking, and a number of the meals seem tailored to the crowd that packs protein and pumps iron.
Now You’re Cooking With Steam
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
I should note that the Tovala Smart Oven Pro is also an interesting little oven on its own, considered aside from the meal kits. On the face, it’s a little toaster oven with added steam-cooking capabilities. But it’s also one of those wonder-devices that promises the moon.
The goofiest feature is a function that can scan a number of frozen-food brands (DiGiorno, Eggo, Amy’s, lots of food at Trader Joe’s) and pre-program the oven on your behalf, which apparently saves you from reading the back of a box. I got some good Eggo waffles out of this, but I think I could have also managed without the help.
One promise that’s kept is that the temperature in the Tovala is also remarkably stable. When I tracked temperature using a wireless thermometer, the temperature curve looked like a broad butte, deviating by only about 4 degrees and staying close to the advertised temperature. This is an impressive performance matched only by my top-line toaster oven picks like the Breville Smart Oven Pro ($269). Though note there’s also a bit of a hot spot in the rear-left of the oven. (WIRED reviewer Joe Ray placed the oven’s hotspot on the rear right, in his review of the previous generation Tovala.)
But the best part about the oven is its steam function. A number of recipes on the Tovala phone app make use of steam heat, but there are two main areas where the oven’s pre-programmed settings come in handy: Large proteins that want to maintain their juiciness, and any version of toast.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
The basic “toast” function on the oven doesn’t just toast. It wanders the bread through multiple cooking modes, including broil and steam. The toast is terrific if you cook it on the oven’s middle rack: moist within because lightly steamed, and evenly cooked. Steam ovens make better toast, as a rule. But alas, if you toast on the bottom rack, you’ll scorch the bottom, an instruction I wish Tovala gave with more warning. Use the middle.
Pre-programmed steaming and convection was also delicious on a recipe for chicken thighs, a long 40-minute cook livened by intermittent bursts of steam to keep the meat from losing its moisture. This succeeded. But I do wish that there were a particular way of knowing how full the water reservoir is, to create said steam heat. I just sorta add water periodically and hope for the best.
Also note that “air frying” on the Tovala Pro is pretty much just convection baking, but in a basket, with no specific air fryer setting. Fries brown up well, but taste like oven fries. Wings are likewise best roasted, not fast-cooked. This thing just isn’t an air fryer. No matter how hard it tries, the Tovala oven is unable to be all things, to all people, at all times.
But the Tovala Pro is a kinda brilliant bachelor device, when used with the meal kit meals. Tovala’s oven is far from perfect, and not every recipe is successful. But the Pro is a powerful oven for those who’d like to avoid the difficult work of cooking, and let their oven do the work instead. Especially on the meal kit meals, Tovala seems to have found a viable solution to the uncertainty (and sogginess) of far too many prepared meal delivery services.
