If you want to cook, bake, dehydrate, or air fry like a pro, the Breville Joule oven air fryer pro is the way to do it. This beautiful countertop appliance is easy to use and clean, and with 13 customizable pre-sets, it’ll help you cook virtually anything. Try out its Wi-Fi-enabled app to access video tutorials and tips that’ll teach you how to make delicious ribs, cookies, apple slices, and more.
What’s in the box of the Breville Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro
In the box of Joule oven, you’ll find what looks like a luxurious countertop toaster oven—but is actually a high-powered air fryer with an oven-style door. This oven is quite large; 55cm x 44cm x 33cm (21.5” x 17.3” x 12.8”), which gives it a well-insulated 23.4 litre capacity.
The Joule Oven Air Fryer comes with two wire racks, which are reversible (horizontally and vertically) to create eight different rack positions within the oven. In the box of Breville’s Joule, you’ll also find a 13″ non-stick pizza pan, a 9″ x 13″ enamel roasting pan, a 9″ x 13″ broiling rack, and a removable drip tray that’s easy to wipe down or wash.
Finally, the Joule comes with a very cool-looking mesh air frying basket, which helps it really crisp up and dehydrate foods when asked to do so.
What can the Joule do?
Like many Breville products, the Breville Joule is pretty cool. It does everything your average air fryer or oven would, but it does so with skill and panache. The Joule has 13 pre-made settings for the following:
- Toast
- Bagel
- Bake
- Air Fry
- Broil
- Roast
- Pizza
- Cookies
- Proof
- Reheat
- Slow Cook
- Keep Warm
- Dehydrate
In addition to its presets, however, you’ll find that each of these settings is customizable. This oven fine-tunes its performance for each one, using rack positions to achieve the perfect, consistent results every time. One of the things that I love about Breville (other than the company’s fantastically well-designed plug-ins, which are made to last) is that the products often use buttons and dials for multiple functions, and this oven is no exception.
The Breville Joule’s “Confirm” button doubles as a “Rotate Remind” button when pressed, which toggles a handy air fryer setting that many of us already know and love. It tells you when to rotate, shake, or glaze your food.
When held down, this oven’s interior light button toggles its display temperature setting (Fahrenheit vs Celsius). A fan button turns on the appliance’s powerful convection fan; a snowflake button toggles extra time for frozen goods. The handy “A Bit More” button adds just a little bit of extra time to the clock when you know your food is almost done.
And, in the bottom corner, a “Favourite” button marked off with a heart lets you save your most-used recipe settings.
The Joule is a really well-made, well-designed small appliance, and it has some high-tech features, too. Using IQ systems and app control, it offers even more than a standard, non-smart device.
Breville Element IQ: What powers the Joule
The Joule is powered by Breville’s Element iQ® system, which uses six independent quartz heating elements to preheat, cook, and maintain your oven at an ideal temperature. It uses something that Breville calls the PID Temperature Control system to check the oven’s internal temperature, which is designed to compensate in advance to prevent temperature overshooting and maintain stable temperatures.
As a result, the Breville the Joule is the perfect oven to bake delicate items in. You can get even more out of the Element iQ system in the Breville Joule Oven app, which gives you access to additional cooking modes that need more precise control (and are therefore only found through the app.) This precise, multi-stage temperature monitoring is great for really finicky recipes like croissants, soufflés, macarons, and other delicate pastries.
The Joule Oven app
To get the most out of the Breville Joule, you’ll need the Joule Oven App.
With the app, this smart oven guides you through video recipes, shows you how to use each of your cooking functions, and helps you discover how to make every meal tastier and more flavourful. The app also integrates voice activation, which can be very convenient when your hands are full or messy, but Breville left one thing to the physical realm that I really appreciate.
To start a recipe, you still have to press the “start” or “confirm” button on your oven. It makes the experience feel a little less high-tech, but honestly? I love it. It’s a seamless safety feature that prevents you from leaving food in the oven for too long before it cooks (for instance, if you wanted to pre-schedule your chicken roast and leave the house before it turns on) and it stops your kids from accidentally turning on the oven when they’re playing with your smartphone. It feels great to be able to get everything set up on my Joule app, then click that one physical button to start its cooking, roasting, baking, or dehydrating process.
Joule Autopilot
One of the most powerful features of the Breville Joule Oven app is something that Breville simply calls “Autopilot.” Autopilot connects with your oven through Wi-Fi so you can proof, bake, and finish your dishes, roasts, and pastries without ever opening your oven door. The result? You can maintain a more consistent heat and humidity in your oven than ever before and achieve those Parisian patisserie-quality results that you’ve always wanted.
Autopilot is great for multi-stage recipes. The Joule app comes loaded with preset “flight plans” for its recommended recipes, and you can sort them by difficulty level, ingredients, dish type, and more. The app’s recipe for croissants is a great one to use as an example to show off Autopilot. It features tips, steps, ingredients, and (like the other recipes in the app) even includes videos on how to laminate your croissants. When you’re ready to put them in the Joule, you can turn Autopilot on—and manually hit the “confirm” button on your air fryer to ensure a safe bake.
The Autopilot flight plan for croissants in this app proofs your viennoiserie for 1 1/2 hours at a perfect 32˚C. Then, it turns up the heat to bake for 10 minutes at 205˚C on super convection (air fry). Finally, it turns the oven down to 165˚C on convection (a gentler fan) using its bottom bake feature to perfectly finish your light, buttery croissants.
Other recipes in the Joule app are similar, changing your oven’s baking temperature and fan controls so that you can achieve perfect results every time.
A few more tips for those using the Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro
- The Joule’s air frying/dehydrating racks are available for purchase separately. The Joule comes with one, but you can fit up to four to air fry or dehydrate large batches at once.
- Pay attention to each setting’s recommended rack position for the best results. This will help you achieve crispiness where you want it and keep foods soft where you don’t!
- You can bake and air fry a lot more than you might think. While the Joule is great for quick meals like frozen fries and chicken fingers, it can do pastries, cookies, pulled pork, and more.
- I even made fresh corn on the cob in this oven! My corn came out tasting juicy, grilled, and delicious in just 15 minutes. The oven’s Autopilot settings: air fry for 13 minutes at 205˚C, then brush on lime and chilli pepper mayonnaise (I used smoked chipotle) and put back in the oven to finish on broil for two minutes.
- For perfect results, fill cookware between 1/2 and 3/4 full every time.
- Use a lid when slow cooking to keep food from drying out. (For even juicier results, cover dishes with aluminum foil and a lid.)
- Only some rack positions (3 and 4) in the Joule magnetize to auto-inject.
- You can use either the included nonstick pizza pan or a pizza stone in the Joule. Preheat both for best results.
- Use the included roasting pan below the wire air fry/dehydrating pan for items that are likely to drip.
- The door is designed to vent steam.
Who would love the Breville Joule?
Breville’s Joule is fantastic for foodies and home chefs with a roomy budget. It’s perfectly designed to offer powerful features and delicious results in true Breville fashion: by following an immense library of tips, tricks, and recommendations, even novice chefs and bakers can easily build their skills.
Breville is a pricier product line, but in my experience, their products are worth it if you have the budget for them. The brand’s smart, app-enabled products are consistently high quality, and a big part of what you’re paying for is the line’s teaching abilities. Each tip and recipe is carefully designed by a large team of experts so that you can learn the exact skill you need in every moment, and often times, you can see someone demonstrating it on the very appliance that you own.
Back when I first tried the Breville Barista Touch, the brand’s automatic espresso machine, I learned more about pulling espresso in a single hour than I did in the past two years watching videos on YouTube and TikTok. The Joule functions in a very similar way, and I know that it will be a great tool for people wanting to learn how to cook at home. If you don’t need the advice and app functions, it’s still a great countertop appliance; but I think it’s even better with them.
The Breville Joule oven air fryer pro is available now at Best Buy.
