Like many children of the late 90s and early aughts, my Easy-Bake oven was my life. A child of the new millennia, I was instantly enamored by this piece of tech that allowed me to take cooking into my own tiny hands and create sweet treats in minutes. So, you could imagine my delight when I came across a device some 20 years later that seemed to improve upon this idea across the board by allowing you anything (breakfast, lunch, dinner, or dessert) with the touch of a button. I’m talking about the Brava Smart Oven. Like most smart ovens, the Brava was designed to make cooking fun, easier, and faster. But does it live up to the hype? How hard is it to use? And most importantly, is it worth the $1000+ price tag? After months of testing and dozens of recipes made, dear reader, I’m happy to say this device is the real deal. The best part? It’s on sale during Prime Day, which ends tonight!

So what makes this smart oven different from the rest of the smart ovens on the market today? One word: light — as in it cooks with light. No, seriously. I’ll be the first to admit that when I first heard this, I cocked my head like a confused puppy. Let me break it down: using a combination of both infrared and visible light (courtesy of the device’s six halogen lamps), the Brava cooks with light, heating up in seconds and cooking anything you throw at it in record time. Able to work as an oven, toaster oven, slow cooker, steamer, air fryer, dehydrator, frying pan, sous vide, and grill, it’s designed to be the ultimate easy-to-use all-in-one device thanks to its intuitive touch screen controls and a library bank of recipes that is constantly being updated with new and exciting dishes (don’t worry, you’re not beholden to these recipes; you can customize them and add your own, too!)

To say I was excited to put this sleek, Jetsons-eqsue device to the test would be an understatement — I checked my package room with bated breath waiting for it to arrive and unpacked it with glee. There are a bunch of things that attracted me to the Brava Oven, with one of the main things being its versatility. As someone still building out their kitchen setup, my appliance collection was pretty sparse, so finding a device that could combine all these functions into one not only seemed cost-efficient but small-space friendly (a must for my studio apartment). Now for the fun part: the cooking.

A couple of days after receiving it, I dedicated a day to cooking solely with my Brava. Alongside the oven, I got the sheet pan, a glass pan, and an egg pan so I figured I’d start with something simple for breakfast to get familiar with the device: eggs and toast. After placing the bread and egg on their respective pans, I tapped the “egg sandwich” recipe, chose my desired egg hardness level, and let it do its thing. Not even five minutes later, I had a perfectly fried egg and crisp toast ready to be plated — minus the fuss.

While doing my research on the Brava, I found the most magical promise of this device to be that thanks to its Pure Light Cooking technology, it could cook multiple foods at the same time at different temperatures, each to perfection. This meant I wouldn’t have to worry about adjusting the temperature or pulling out extra pots and pans to cook an entire meal. It seemed impossible, so for my next test, I decided to go all in with something I personally find to be the trickiest to cook: salmon.

Attempting to recreate an image I saw on the company’s site, I put together a meal consisting of two pieces of salmon, green beans, and fingerling potatoes. Following the machine’s preset recipe instructions (but jazzing it up with some of my own spices), I placed each item on its own part of the sheet (each pan comes divided into three sections) and crossed my fingers. To my utter shock, it worked perfectly. The salmon? Tender and flaky. The green beans? Crunchy and delicious. The potatoes? Crisp on the outside, soft on the inside. I was flabbergasted.

The last test was dessert: chocolate chip cookies. While I could always crank up my conventional oven to cook up a batch of cookies, I was really interested in trying it out in the Brava for two reasons: to make a smaller batch and to prevent heating up my apartment on a hot summer night. After putting together my mother’s secret recipe (sorry, can’t share it), I placed them in the Brava, put it in Bake mode (where you manually set the time and temperature like a regular oven), and waited for my cookies — oat milk in hand. They came out at about the same time as they normally would in a regular oven and were exactly how I like them, crisp and chewy. Yep, I was sold.

Now you’re probably saying to yourself, “Sarah, why would I need this oven when I have a perfectly good oven in my kitchen?” to which I would say two things: time and space. For me, time is precious and while I do love a big cooking extravaganza, there are days when I want to do anything but spend hours in the kitchen cooking, monitoring my meal, and cleaning up. With the Brava, cooking on crazy days is less laborious and, for the most part, foolproof (I’ll never make better salmon than my Brava does). It also provides me with the opportunity to save so much space by not having to invest in extra kitchen appliances for my home, which honestly would’ve been just as expensive of an investment. Having a true all-in-one appliance is a game-changer.