X

Jenn-Air's 30-inch microwave is a roomy over-the-range option

Jenn-Air 30-inch over-the-range microwave offers plenty of room and functions.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
Kim Girard
2 min read

With this Jenn-Air 30-inch microwave oven you're paying a little more than rival models for more features and a roomy interior for cooking larger dishes.

This oven, model JMV8208BAB, doesn't have speed cook or convection, but it offers a generous 2.0 cubic feet of cooking space and lots of functionality.

Jenn-Air oven has a roomy interior, many cooking features. Jenn-Air

The oven's features include a halogen work surface light so you can keep an eye on food as it cooks, preprogrammed one-touch electronic buttons, more/less pads for adding or reducing cooking times, and a warming mode. A 30-second pad lets you heat in short increments. Sensors on this model automatically sense moisture in food and adjust cooking so you won't ruin a dish. Staged cooking cycles also let you program two cycles at once so you don't have to stop the oven after, say, defrosting to program it again.

For cooking, a turntable and a WideGlide tray that moves side to side for more even heating of bigger dishes and casseroles are included.

A five-level, built-in exterior exhaust with an automatic timer helps reduce smoke and odors. While this oven is preset to vent inside, it can be changed for outside ventilation.

There aren't many online reviews of this oven as Jenn-Air is a smaller name in microwaves. (GE leads the pack, selling more over-the-range models than any other vendor). In the over-the-range space, however, Consumer Reports includes LG and Samsung models as Best Buys that are about half the price of this Jenn-Air. In the Jenn-Air price range, the magazine recommends the Kenmore (Sears) Elite 8082.

This Jenn-Air model is available in white and black (about $648) and stainless steel (about $748).