The Tovala oven and meal kit are like a robot chef from the future past

A smart oven delivers freshly cooked, scannable meals with almost no prep time. Family meals pack four hearty servings in a small oven. The oven is a good oven even without the meal plan.

Sodium and fat can reach stratospheric levels. International meals are neither faithful nor successful. You have to buy the oven to eat the food.

Tovala and meal delivery service. It’s also an oven. And in a way, it also feels like a very specific vision of the future. Tovala is not quite a robot chefExactly. But it’s not not neither does a robot chef. It’s a robot chef like we imagine in old science fiction, or an episode of Wallace and Gromit.

The idea behind Tovala is simple. You receive a box in the mail containing a complete set of ingredients, individually packaged with vacuum-packed proteins. Here is your Parmesan Crusted Chicken Breast with Cheese Stuffed Shells and Garlic Bread. Or here’s your Togarashi Chicken Breast and Sweet Soy Noodles.

The only kitchen utensil you will need to prepare your meals is a pair of scissors to open the small bags. Then, place each ingredient in the correct place in a series of aluminum trays and put them in the Tovala oven. Present a small QR code to a laser on the oven, and the smart little combi oven will do the rest by moving through a series of pre-programmed steps. The oven steams, convects, grills, cooks all by itself.

It’s ingenious in its own way, one of the few meal kits to offer such simple preparation while still providing a real, freshly cooked meal. (And I should know. I tested 20 meal delivery services last year.) But when I first tested the Tovala meal kit and oven last year, I noticed that the small oven had a very serious limitation: it only prepared one meal at a time. This has limited its potential audience to single diners or couples who don’t mind eating consecutively.

Tovala responded this year with Family Meals, which implausibly manage to fit two to four, often hearty, servings into a single small countertop oven. I tried five, ranging from Italian sausage and gnocchi to chicken togarashi. They are often delicious, with surprisingly juicy meat, full flavor and a simple sauce. But nutrition will depend on the beholder: it’s a bit like eating at a restaurant every day.

Each meal costs between $9 and $13 per serving, plus a delivery fee of $11 per box. In exchange for buying six weeks’ worth of meals, you get a big discount on a powerful little oven, whose app also offers advice on a number of other mostly automated recipes, including surprisingly excellent runny eggs to put on avocado toast.

How Tovala works

Tovala is an exception in the world of meal delivery services, in that the company seems to want to completely change the way you cook at home. For this you will need a specialist Tovala smart oveneither the original $299 oven or an upgraded Smart Oven Pro ($349) equipped with a steam function. I highly recommend giving the steam oven a try, provided you like juicy meat or good toast.

But you are unlikely to pay full price for the oven. If you order six weeks of meals with the Tovala Meal Plan, you end up with a significant discount, down to $119 for the Pro and just $69 for the non-smoking original. To further sweeten the pot, Tovala offers a 100-day money-back guarantee if you don’t love your oven, which is way more time than you’d need to try out your six weeks of meals if you wanted.

Most recipes take between 15 minutes and half an hour, and then a surprisingly moist chicken breast crusted with whatever spices or crust you put on top appears. The same goes for a mountain of sauced gnocchi or a luxuriously thick cut of filet mignon. Each one might taste a little better than expected – and certainly better than almost any meal prepared using a microwave.

Indeed, of the many meal delivery services I’ve tested, Tovala may come closest to what many people imagine when they think of the words “meal kit.” The assembly is easy, the food is fresh, and the oven offers many labor-saving aids.

Each week’s box from Tovala contains four to a dozen meals, with $11 per box shipping cost. So if you ordered the bare minimum of four single-serve meals, you’ll pay $63 per week. This is of course more than just take-out cooking, but less than take-out cooking. Portion sizes for each meal range from 500 to a thousand calories.

There are around 45 options each week, but very few of them will be vegetarian. Carb-conscious or “gluten-free” options fare better, but note that Tovala doesn’t promise gluten safety if you’re celiac.

If you’re not making a Tovala meal (or one of the countless recipes in the Tovala app that don’t require meal delivery), the oven isn’t really an air fryer, but it’s otherwise competitive with some of the best countertop ovens on the market. Heat is accurate and generally uniform, measured with temperature probes. The app offers programmed recipes, even for basic ingredients, with steam cycles to prevent food from drying out. The oven also makes great toast as long as you remember to use the middle rack of the oven. (If you use the lower rack, you will burn your bread.)

Family-style preparation

I especially enjoyed the single-serve meals I tried last year at Tovala. I particularly happily praised a filet mignon braised in red wine and a chicken and chickpea salad “with tandoori spices” accompanied by a drizzle of mint chutney. A bowl of meat and quinoa sprinkled with almonds was nicely drizzled with cilantro chimichurri.

But until recently, Tovala meals were single-serving, excluding families or perhaps even couples who like to eat together. Its audience was therefore much more limited. The new family meals significantly change those calculations.

About four meal options each week currently offer four-serving options. Each costs less per serving than single-serve meals, although they don’t skimp on calories, about $9 per serving or $36 for the meal box. Note that although they cost more, Family Meals only count as one “meal” if you signed up for four meals per week. You may need to adjust the total number of meals you receive each month to compensate.

Initially, I was skeptical about Tovala’s ability to fit four decent-sized portions into its small oven. The meal service achieves this, somewhat ingeniously, by simultaneously using every square inch of the lower oven rack and air fry basket to cook generous four-serving meals, usually using aluminum baking sheets that can be tiled four to a layer.

I was concerned that this would disrupt air circulation, but the meals were mostly well prepared. As for robot chefs, Tovala is rather well calibrated.

While preparing single-serve meals typically takes less than three minutes (just cut and empty the plastic bags in the right places), preparing meals for four people involves four times as many bags. Expect about 10 minutes for squeezing proteins and sauces, or pouring spice powders and cheese into just the right spots.

High flavor, high sodium

As you might expect when putting so much in the oven, there’s a bit of a compromise – or at least a bit less flexibility. Most meals fell into the “large protein plus” category. Chicken teriyaki, chicken parmesan, and chicken togarashi all involve pretty much the same brined, vacuum-packed chicken breast.

All arrive with a different sauce but roughly the same texture: it tastes and feels like steamed chicken, moist but without any particular browning. This worked best with chicken parmesan whose cheese browned in the oven and added a little texture.

A garlic and herb salmon with risotto was probably the best among the family meals I tried. The chopped asparagus was less visually appealing when drizzled with garlic butter, but still flavorful and a little crispy. The salmon was tender and flaky. And the sweet pea risotto had no choice but to be delicious. There was so much cheese, butter and lemon that it was pretty much a concert of fats and acids.

This chicken was also a mountain of cheese and salt. It reminded me pleasantly of the countless family meals I had as a child in the 1980s: cheesy chicken, garlic bread, shells stuffed with ricotta and topped with even more cheese. The big difference is that there is simply no way my mother would have made this meal without a vegetable.

And it is in nutrition that Toval fails a little. The nutritional notes of this chicken meal t and parm reveal 2,300 milligrams of sodium per serving, or about the entire daily intake of an adult human. This is also on par with comparable servings of Stouffer’s Meat Lasagna. The Tovala meal also contained about 10 times more cholesterol than Stouffer’s.

Many other meals followed a similar pattern, loading up on fat and salt in order to make the meals tasty. The net effect is that it tastes a lot more like rich restaurant food than what most people make at home. It’s up to you to decide if it’s good or bad quality.

Only one of the seven meals I tried completely failed: I reported a teriyaki chicken dinner to my editor as a possible cultural crime against Japan. The meal consisted of pale, steaming sweet soy chicken, with an implausible side of thick spring rolls and loose, unseasoned broccoli. It looked like the “Japanese” food you might find in a mall food court in the 90s. But again, this was a rare major misstep.

A more pernicious problem in meals designed for the whole family is the almost universal content of fat, cholesterol and sodium. Many people with the income and willingness to eat hearty, effortless meals like Tovala’s are either parents with children or people of retirement age. Everyone has their own reason for wanting a little more nutrition and less fat and salt.

After a few weeks of recipe testing, I admit that I felt a little relieved. I was grateful to feel my arteries slowly reopening. Tovala’s culinary model makes a lot of sense to me, as it’s a smart way to split the difference between prepared foods and fresh foods. And the company has proven that it can cook well. Maybe it would be nice if they also prepared a more sustainable diet.

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