Brava Countertop Oven

The Brava oven cooks with light instead of convection, using 6 infrared lamps that can heat different zones of the cooking surface to different temperatures simultaneously. Watching it sear a steak on one side of the tray while roasting vegetables on the other at a lower temperature makes you rethink what a countertop appliance can do. The cooking chamber is small, roughly the footprint of a toaster oven, but heat output is intense enough to preheat in under a minute and reach 500 degrees in 2. That eliminates the biggest annoyance of cooking in a conventional oven. Hundreds of preset programs fill the app, and the interface lets you build custom meals by dragging items onto a virtual tray. Clever, because it maps the digital layout to the physical zones in the oven. My apartment kitchen has a bad electric stove and no ventilation. This would let me cook meals that taste like they came from a real kitchen. Trays are color-coded, and the oven reads which tray you insert to auto-select the right cooking program, removing a step from the process. At $1,095 it costs more than most kitchen appliances I'll own as a student, but the technology is genuinely different from anything else in the category.