Why You Can Trust CNET GE Profile Built-In Double Convection Wall Oven PT9550SFSS review: Special features make this GE double oven shine
Is the GE Profile Built-In Double Convection Wall Oven worth its hefty $3,699 price tag?
GE's $3,699 Profile Built-In Electric Double Convection Wall Oven offers advanced features that make it stand out from other models in its price range. A strip of red LEDs above the upper oven lets you track how much time is left until your food is finished -- a useful supplement to the standard digital timer. Even better is the remote control and pre-heat capability that comes with's GE Brillion app. None of these extras mean much without strong basic features and impressive cooking performance, but fortunately this oven has those things, too. I strongly recommend this GE double oven if you love to cook large amount of food, and you want a tool for the job that's sophisticated, high-end, and a little bit quirky.
GE Profile Built-In Double Convection Wall Oven PT9550SFSS
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Features
One of my favorite features of the PT9550SFSS is that it's compatible with the GE Brillion app. Only select GE wall ovens work with this app, so get excited, smart-home fans. The app allows you to preheat your oven, get alerts when your food is done, and change the oven temperature all from your Android or iOS device. The $1,399
I also really like the red LED status bar situated between the display panel and the upper oven door. It acts as a supplement to the standard digital timer -- as the clock counts down, the LED light bar advances across the face of the oven. It also works as a preheat notifier. When it's preheating, the LED strip pulses and when it's finished, the bar turns solid red. I love this feature, but there's one caveat. The status bar only works for the upper oven. Still, it's a unique addition that might actually make it easier for you to check on your food when you're in the kitchen, but can't quite see the timer. And, if the LED strip annoys you for any reason, you can always disable it.
In addition to those unique features, the oven comes with a complement of standards as well. The Upper Oven and Lower Oven buttons located on the top left are pretty self explanatory. Next to that, you'll see the following cooking modes -- convection bake, convection multirack bake, convection broil on high, low, and crisp, convection roast, traditional bake, traditional broil on high and low, proof, and warm modes. There's a Lock Controls button so you can lock the display panel buttons and a Remote Enable button on the left side, too (which you use to connect the oven to the GE Brillion app).
The display screen is located in the center of the oven control panel. That's where you'll see the current time and any other cooking mode and temperature details. The Start button sits on the right side of the display along with Cancel/Off, Timer On/Off, Steam Clean, Self Clean, and oven light buttons for both the upper and lower oven. There's also a numeric keypad, and Cook Time, Set Clock AM/PM, Delay Time AM/PM, and probe buttons.
Steam Clean targets smaller messes and uses a lower temperature to clean during a quick 30-minute cycle. Before starting a Steam Clean cycle, the care manual suggests wiping away any obvious stains and pouring a cup of water into the bottom of the oven. When it's finished, the oven door will unlock automatically. Self Clean works in much the same way, except that it's designed to tackle significant amounts of grease or other heavy stains and takes several hours to complete a cycle. After it's finished, the door will remain locked until the oven cools down.
This oven also boasts 10-pass bake elements, 10-pass dual broil elements, and closed door broiling. That's all pretty standard for ovens these days. The 10-pass heating elements are large enough to spread across an oven cavity. They ensure that your food is as evenly cooked as possible.
It also includes two "self-clean heavy-duty oven racks" for both ovens and one "self-clean roller rack" for the upper oven, all of which can stay in the oven during a self-clean cycle. The upper and lower ovens both have six rack positions so you can make height adjustments as needed. The interior of each oven is outfitted with three halogen lights for better visibility. Yep, it has pretty much everything you'd ever need from an oven.
Electrolux's $3,549 Electric Double Wall Oven with Wave-Touch Controls EW30EW65GS, KitchenAid's $3,499 Convection Double Wall Oven KEBS209BSP, Bosch's $2,999 500 Series Double Wall Oven HBL5650UC, and Whirlpool's $2,649 Gold Double Wall Oven with the True Convection Cooking WOD93EC0AS are all in roughly the same price range as this GE double oven. They offer a lot of the same features, too, but, none of them come with app compatibility or an LED status bar. Some of them do offer features that the GE double oven doesn't, though.
The Electrolux double oven offers a "Perfect Turkey" button designed for poultry and a "My Favorite" settings option so you can save three of your most-used modes. The display panel design looks interesting, too -- apparently, the entire display panel is "asleep" until you activate it with a single touch. It has seven rack height positions compared with GE's six.
The KitchenAid model has six rack positions like the GE double oven. However, it has 8-pass broil elements rather than GE's 10-pass unit. The Bosch double oven offers a fast preheat option, six rack heights, and a pizza and pie mode. The Whirlpool double oven also comes with six rack positions, but it offers a rapid preheat setting like the Bosch model. I would like to see a fast preheat option in the GE oven. Otherwise, I'm not overly impressed with the features on these other ovens. I definitely think the GE double oven leads in features in its price range.
Design
The specific model we tested is finished in stainless steel (PT9550SFSS), but you can also get it in black for $3,499 (PT9550SFBB). It weighs 284 pounds and measures 29.75 inches wide by 52.625 inches tall by 27.1875 inches deep. The cutout dimensions are 28.5 inches wide by 51.8125 inches tall by 23.5 inches deep and the interior dimensions of both ovens is 25 inches wide by 17.375 inches tall by 20.25 inches deep. Your cabinet should be 30 inches wide to accommodate this model.
The upper and lower ovens both offer 5-cubic-foot capacities. That's pretty big for a double oven -- the $4,999
Usability
This oven is pretty easy to use, but the control panel could be better. The display panel looks great, but the organization of the buttons is just plain weird. The upper and lower oven buttons are scattered around in a way that doesn't feel very intuitive and actually makes it harder to interact with the display. It's also difficult to see the clock at certain angles, although the LED progress bar can help here.
I found the GE Brillion app very easy to set up and use. It's available for Android (4.2 Jelly Bean or higher) and iOS (6 or higher) users and is optimized for smartphones, but will work on tablets, too. Simply download the app and follow the instructions to get started. You do have to press the Remote Enable button on your oven before you plan to use the app. That part is a little annoying, but if you can remember to do that when you first put the food in the oven, it won't be a bother. After that, you can monitor or make changes to your oven settings from any Wi-Fi network and remotely via 3G, 4G, or LTE.
In comparison, the LG Smart ThinQ app for the LG LRE3027ST range is only available on your home Wi-Fi and it's incredibly difficult to set up. Even if you do manage to get the app to work initially, it's tough to navigate and you can't actually preheat, cook, or adjust your oven settings remotely.
Performance
We baked biscuits, roasted whole chickens, broiled ham steaks, and roasted pork tenderloins in this GE double oven. Yes, there has been a lot of delicious food flying around the office lately and yes, I've spent a significant amount of time lurking around the oven so I don't miss anything. A major benefit of my, uh, diligence is that I was able to get a very good sense of how the GE Profile PT9550SFSS performs using different cooking modes, temperatures, times, and recipes.
We cooked the same stuff in the $4,999
Baking biscuits
We baked two racks of canned, refrigerated biscuits per run on traditional bake mode and then on convection multirack bake mode in the upper oven alone and then in both the upper and lower oven at the same time. These tests not only compare the traditional and convection bake modes, they also tell us how the oven handles two racks of food and simultaneous cooking in the upper and lower ovens. We preheated the oven to 450 degrees for traditional bake and 425 for convection multirack bake, put a dozen biscuits in each each rack, and baked them for 9 minutes.
As you can tell by the side-by-side comparisons, the Dacor biscuits were the most evenly cooked in traditional bake mode. Then things steadily worsened. The Samsung biscuits weren't uniform, but they weren't over or underdone. The LG biscuits from the top rack were nearly burnt and the biscuits from the bottom rack could have used a couple more minutes in the oven. The color difference between the upper and lower rack in the GE oven was pretty extreme -- the top rack was very dark and the bottom rack was very light. The GE oven definitely yielded the least consistent batch of the four. The same was true when we cooked biscuits in the upper and lower ovens at the same time using traditional bake mode. Not good.
The GE double oven maintained the lowest overall temperature during our biscuit test. It also had the most significant temperature drop -- from 404 degrees to 235 degrees when the oven door was opened to add the biscuits for cooking. I suspect that inconsistency contributed to the end result between the upper and lower racks of biscuits. The location of the heating element and the oven rack heights the GE manual suggests for multirack baking might also have a hand in the uneven cooking as well.
Convection heat is generally the option of choice when it comes to baking because it tends to cook more evenly (convection heat technology circulates the air around the oven rather than staying in one spot). GE's convection multirack biscuits were much more even than its traditional bake biscuits -- and the same was true for the other ovens as well. Once again, Dacor took the lead with perfectly even biscuits, followed by Samsung, GE, and LG.
The temperature readings may look a little chaotic on the convection bake mode charts, but the temperature swings are much less dramatic than they were in traditional bake mode. Just compare the GE single oven traditional bake mode to the GE single oven convection bake mode. The convection technology is working hard to stay within a target temperature range. Definitely stick to convection mode when you're baking in the GE oven, especially if you're baking more than one rack simultaneously.
Roasting a whole chicken
This delicious test gave us the chance to evaluate the convection roast function of the GE double oven. We butterflied a whole 10-pound chicken, preheated the oven to 350 degrees, and roasted it for 1 hour and 15 minutes or until the temperature probes in the right and left side of the chicken each reached an internal temperature of 165 degrees. We ran single oven tests using just the upper oven and also cooked a chicken in the upper and lower oven at the same time. And the GE chicken consistently took the longest to reach temperature in all of our convection roast tests (take a look at the slideshow for more details).
As far as taste, the Dacor chicken was consistently the best "homemade" oven-roasted chicken I've ever tasted. It turned out absolutely delicious. Every. Single. Time. The GE and Samsung chickens were both very good, but not quite as tasty as the Dacor chicken. The LG chicken was all right, but not memorable -- the skin wasn't nearly as crispy and the meat wasn't nearly as juicy as any of the others.
If I hadn't ever had the Dacor chicken, I would have said that the GE and Samsung chickens were great. The Dacor oven just took this test to a level I didn't even know existed. For the price range, I can't fault the GE or Samsung ovens, but the Dacor chicken completely changed the game. It's nice to know that if you're going to spend that much on an oven, you get what you pay for.
Broiling ham
This test involved broiling bone-in ham steaks on high until they reached an internal temperature of 148 degrees. Both the Dacor and GE ovens have a traditional and convection broil mode, while the LG and Samsung ovens only offer traditional broil modes. So, we broiled ham steaks in all four models on high using traditional mode. Then we tested the Dacor and GE's ability to broil on high on convection mode separately using just the upper oven for a single oven test and both the upper and lower ovens for a double oven test.
The LG oven used the open-door broil method and all of the others used the closed-door broil method. The Samsung ham always finished first and the Dacor ham always finished last, with the GE and LG hams finishing somewhere in the middle. The Dacor, GE, and Samsung hams were all similarly good, with no distinguishable differences in taste and appearance. The LG ham, on the other hand, was significantly overcooked. That was unexpected given that a lot of heat escaped through the LG oven's partially open door.
But why did the Dacor oven take so much longer than the others overall? We followed the rack height suggestions in each user guide for the ham tests. The Dacor manual suggests placing the rack farther away from the heating element than the GE manual does, which seems to account for the temperature disparity between the two. The cook time differences didn't seem to hurt either oven's results in this case, though.
Roasting pork tenderloin
Since this double oven comes with a thermometer probe and a dedicated probe setting, we decided to use this mode to cook a couple of pork tenderloins -- one in the upper oven and one in the lower oven. We used the keypad to select the target internal temperature of 160 degrees and inserted the probe into the pork. The oven automatically turned off when the GE probe gave a temperature reading of 160 degrees.
The GE probe and our temperature probes were very close in the upper oven test. They always landed within 10 degrees or less of one another. The lower oven test, on the other hand, didn't go quite as well. You can see a pretty significant temperature difference at the 12-minute mark on the lower oven chart. The GE probe read 81 degrees, while our temperature probes averaged 115.8 degrees. That's nearly a 35-degree difference. Overall, the GE probe does pretty well. Just make sure to double check your readings and consider using a backup thermometer to make sure you've reached a safe temperature, particularly in the lower oven.
The verdict
The GE Profile Built-In Double Convection Wall Oven PT9550SFSS is a solid oven. It consistently performed well during our testing and produced very tasty results. Not only that, but this double oven offers special features, like remote preheating via the GE Brillion app, and an LED status bar that make it more unique than your regular high-end double oven. It may have classic, understated looks, but it's definitely a modern oven with advanced options and functionality. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys cooking and wants an oven that can keep up with them.
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