Honest, uncut Suvie oven review

Hi, my name is Catherine, and I love buying kitchen appliances. Thankfully, I have space at home for the essentials: giant Instant Pot, stand mixer, two food processors, multi-function countertop oven, and – now – a Suvie Kitchen System 3.0+.

I bought the Suvie oven as a splurge purchase to streamline my weekday meal prep. Before Suvie, life’s many obligations had me prepping Factor microwave meals for dinner. And while those aren’t bad, I wanted a better process for quick meal prep – specifically, a process that didn’t involve microwaving vegetables.

After some research, I bought the Suvie oven along with a Suvie meal plan. I’ve had the appliance and the meal plan for three months, and here’s my take on both. This review was not sponsored or requested by Suvie.

Quick take: Suvie oven is convenient, meals are good

The Suvie oven is quirky but convenient, and the Suvie-prepared meals I’ve had range in quality from good to great. I love that I can prep my dinner in the morning, put it in the oven, and schedule a cook completion time. I also appreciate that I can use Suvie’s scheduling power on my own meals as well as Suvie-prepared meals.

One negative is the cost of the Suvie-prepared meals. The per-serving price is $12+ and the ingredients seem to comprise a tiny fraction of that price. You definitely pay for the convenience more than the actual food. I can accept that trade-off to a point, but you may feel differently.

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Suvie oven overview

The Suvie is a multi-function kitchen appliance that refrigerates and cooks. Because it gets cold as well as hot, you can add fresh or frozen ingredients to the oven and schedule cooking for later. The refrigeration protects your ingredients until the oven turns on. There is a setting to cook from frozen, which presumably tells the Suvie to stay even colder until it’s time to start cooking.

The cooking modes are:

• Roast
• Air fry
• Bake
• Broil
• Sous vide
• Slow cook
• Steam
• Reheat
• Egg mode
• Proof

The oven has two zones, and you can generally use different settings on each zone. You might sous vide a steak in the bottom while you roast veggies in the top, for example. You can do this on different schedules, too. It’s no problem if your steak takes 20 minutes and your veggies take 35.

Note: You cannot use sous vide and slow cook modes at different temperatures at the same time.

Meal scheduling workflow

To schedule a cook plan on the Suvie, start by pushing the knob. This opens the settings. You set up the bottom zone first, by selecting a cook mode, temperature, and time. For the top zone, you can duplicate bottom zone settings, choose different settings, or leave the top zone off.

Next, you set whether you’re cooking from frozen ingredients with a yes/no toggle. You can then select to cook the meal now or schedule it for later. If you schedule the meal for later, you set the time you want your food to be done, and the unit will go into refrigeration mode initially.

Pans

My Suvie oven came with two deep pans, one roasting rack, an air fry basket, and two sheet pans. I have used all the pans except the sheet pans. The deep pans get the most use in my kitchen. Fortunately, they are easy to clean.

You cannot use your own pans unless they are magically the right size.

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Pricing

You can buy the oven for $149 if you also buy a meal plan consisting of at least six meal boxes in the first year. When you sign up for the plan, you get 12 servings free. The regular price on a meal box with four meals for two people — eight servings total — is about $120 including tax and shipping.

The “regular” price on the oven is $649.

Meal plan

You can opt for a meal box weekly, bimonthly, or monthly. You can customize your meals and skip weeks as needed. Fewer shipments with more meals is an option because the meals are frozen, so you don’t need to eat them immediately. You will save on shipping this way.

The meal plan selection is good, but not great. My husband is a picky eater and we’ve already worked through nearly all the recipes that fit his parameters — at least those without a premium price tag.

Seafood and steak meals do cost more, sometimes substantially more. One thing I don’t like is that Suvie will auto-add these pricey meals to your box, which increases the box price to upwards of $170. You can avoid unintended expensive meals by setting a reminder to yourself to customize your meals before the shipment is finalized.

The good

What I love most about my Suvie oven:

1. The ability to schedule cooking later in the day is a gamechanger, particularly if your evenings are booked solid.
2. Two zones with separate settings streamlines meal prep. I made a meal with reheated pulled pork in one zone and baked sweet potatoes. I prepped the ingredients and scheduled different temperatures and cook times for each zone. Everything was ready as expected, even though the potatoes took an hour and a half to bake and the pork took 15 minutes to reheat.
3. I can schedule my own meals and Suvie-prepped meals. The oven would have a lot less value in my life if it only worked with Suvie’s prepacked, frozen meals.
4. The Suvie-prepped meals are frozen. Most meal services send you fresh ingredients. Fresh is preferred from a flavor perspective, particularly when produce is involved. But frozen meals are vastly more convenient, because you’re not on a short timeline to consume them.

The bad

The appliance has some quirks, such as:

1. The water level monitoring is questionable. The Suvie uses water to power its refrigerator and some of the cook modes. The thing is, it’s not always clear how much water the appliance needs. It has prompted me to add water, then overflowed all over my kitchen counter.
2. The oven is noisy. The Suvie makes a lot of gurgling noises.
3. Counter placement can be tricky. The oven is 14 inches tall and requires 4 inches of clearance on the sides and 6 inches of clearance behind. It won’t fit in a small, tight kitchen.
4. The cool down cycle can be problematic. If the ambient room temperature is 75 degrees or higher, the oven may prompt you to run a cool-down cycle. The problem is, you don’t know the cool-down is needed until you’ve prepped your food in the pans and you’re ready to schedule the cook. And the cool-down cycle prompts you to use the pans for water and ice. So…the instruction requires you to undo your prep to run the cool-down cycle, then redo your prep. That is a bad workflow, given this oven is positioned as a time-saver.

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The ugly

The ugly aspects of the Suvie oven are related more to the recipe instructions than the oven itself. Twice my oven has produced under-cooked chicken, and once I had crunchy rice. Here are my tips to avoid those scenarios:

1. Keep meat pieces from touching one another. Chicken pieces are more likely to be under-cooked if they are touching or overlapping. I cooked a frozen Suvie meal for four and the chicken pieces did overlap due to their shape. The overlapping areas were still raw after the cook cycle was done.
2. Pay attention to the settings. The per-person settings are important with frozen Suvie meals. Don’t forget to switch to four servings if you are indeed cooking for four people.
3. Use your judgment with Suvie blog recipes. Suvie’s blog, Recette Magazine, publishes recipes that are presumably optimized for the Suvie oven. Out of the three Recette recipes I made, two were not workable with the provided cook settings and instructions. One produced under-cooked chicken and the other had crunchy, uncooked rice. If the timing, heat settings, or prep instructions of a Recette recipe don’t seem right, they probably aren’t. Adjust accordingly.
4. Adjust for scheduled cooks. If you are going to rely on Suvie’s refrigeration, consider setting a longer or hotter cook time to account for the cooler temperatures in play when the oven turns on.
5. Always check for doneness. Don’t wait until your chicken breast is plated to check for doneness. Use a meat thermometer after resting to prevent raw-meat mishaps.

Recipes I made in the Suvie oven

I made these Suvie recipes from Recette Magazine:

1. Chimichurri steak. To date, the best thing my Suvie oven has produced.
2. Super simple crispy chicken thighs. Thumbs down on this one. The chicken thighs were not crispy or even cooked thoroughly.  
3. Stuffed cabbage rolls. Also thumbs down. The recipe calls for uncooked rice, which remained fully crunchy after three hours of slow cooking. Mistakes like this make me wonder if they’re using ChatGPT to produce their recipes.

I’ve also used the Suvie to roast potatoes, air fry or reheat leftovers, and warm burger buns. The Suvie performs these every day, off-the-cuff cooking tasks well, in part because it heats up very quickly.

Suvie oven: Quirky, but convenient

I don’t regret my Suvie oven purchase, mostly because I’ve learned how to work around its quirks. I have also gotten hooked on scheduling my meals, which is the oven’s most powerful capability.

Whether this kitchen robot works for you depends on how you plan to use it and how adaptable you are. If you don’t already have appliances for air frying, slow cooking, and sous viding, it might be worthwhile to add those tools to your arsenal. And, if you’re willing to experiment with your own recipes, that’s where this oven proves the most value.