Why You Can Trust CNET Wolfgang Puck Pressure Oven review: Faster cooking with a few key flaws
This countertop cooker will have meat-eaters feasting faster than ever.
- 10 years product testing experience with the CNET Home team
Busy home cooks are always on the lookout for faster, easier ways of preparing great tasting meals. For $249.95, that's exactly what the Wolfgang Puck Pressure Oven is offering. With the moisture-sealing, flavor-infusing power of a pressure cooker packed into a versatile countertop oven design, this is an appliance that makes some pretty bold performance claims -- including promises of cooking a full-size turkey in less than an hour.
Wolfgang Puck Pressure Oven
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Chef Puck's pressure oven is marketed with a certain degree of skepticism-inducing, "but-wait-there's-more" schtick. Not only will your meats cook faster, it claims, but they'll also be juicier and more flavorful (for an extra $100 you can add a built-in rotisserie rack to get them juicier-er and more flavorful-er). Not a meat-eater? No problem! The Puck Oven promises to cook casseroles, soups, vegetables, cookies, and anything else you'd make in a traditional oven, all in less time and while using less power.
Schtick aside, there's plenty of truth to the Puck Oven's claims. The time-saving advantages of pressure cookers are nothing new, and at its core, the Puck Oven is just that -- a pressure cooker. What sets it apart is the fact that it adds a built-in heating element, a larger capacity, and a window for monitoring your meal during the cooking process. Does all of that add up to value at $249? For certain home cooks, I believe that it might -- particularly if large cuts of meat are a regular fixture on the menu.
The Wolfgang Puck Pressure Oven is a big, boxy appliance, with dimensions of 19.9 inches long by 15.9 inches wide by 12.4 inches tall and a weight just shy of 30 pounds. You can expect it to take up a fair deal of space on your countertop -- certainly more than than the common toaster oven you might be using it to replace.
In terms of design, the shiny, stainless-steel finish helps to give the Puck Oven a high-end sheen, but it's a look that gets undercut by plastic dials that feel somewhat cheap, along with dated-looking lights and no LED display. It certainly isn't as appealing to look at as appliances like the
You'll be able to cook at up to 450 degrees using one of five cooking modes: bake, broil, toast, roast, or warm. To turn the oven on, you'll turn the timer dial to the desired cooking time, or to the always-on position. One quibble: the markings on the timer are rather imprecise, with 20-minute intervals. This is fine if you're roasting a chicken for forty minutes, but if you're using the toast setting, good luck getting the bread goldenbrown without babysitting it.
To use the Puck Oven's pressure cooking capabilities, you'll preheat the oven and insert your food, as you normally would. From there, you'll pull a lever on the front of the machine to seal the door shut, then turn a valve on top to the sealed position as well. With the majority of heat and moisture trapped inside, the pressure will quickly start to rise, and super-hot steam will begin permeating whatever it is that you're cooking. The valve will continue to hiss during pressure cooking as hot air escapes out the top, which keeps the pressure from reaching unsafe levels.
This valve is actually one of my primary complaints with the Puck Oven, though. By design, it sits loosely in the vent, which can leave doubt as to whether or not you're using it right if, like me, you aren't terribly experienced with pressure cooking. Even if you are experienced, you still might find yourself confused, as there appear to be two separate "SEAL" positions to choose from (it's actually one large sealed position with two labels).
On top of that, the tiny pointer arrow indicating which direction to aim the valve sits opposite a large, conspicuous handle. On more than one occasion, I had to correct myself after absent-mindedly using the handle and not the arrow to aim the valve, a mistake that could potentially lead to improperly cooked food -- or worse, a safety concern.
I had a difficult time ever feeling truly comfortable with the pressure valve. When you're finished pressure cooking something, you'll need to turn it back to the vented position to let the hot air escape -- failing to do so could cause you to get scalded by steam as you unseal the door. Of course, this means you're putting your fingers in harm's way. I tried opening the valve while wearing an oven mitt, but it's difficult to do without gripping the handle with your fingertips. You can't just bump it into position. I never quite burned myself while letting the hot air out, but I also couldn't help but come close.
Performance under pressure
Of course, the reward for putting up with the added demands of a pressure cooker is the food, and this is where the Puck Oven truly delivers. The oven comes with a recipe book, along with a handy conversion chart comparing the normal cook-times of various dishes with their adjusted cook-times under pressure. We started with a standard recipe for an 8-pound roast chicken, which called for a little over 2 hours in the oven. The Puck Oven claimed it would take 43 minutes.
After cooking an equal-sized control chicken in a standard convection oven for 2 hours to confirm the original recipe, we loaded our test chicken into the pressure oven and sealed it shut. Forty-three minutes later, it was fully-cooked, with crispy skin on the outside and tender, juicy, flavorful meat on the inside. Our taste-testers were in total agreement: the Puck Oven produced the better bird, and it did it in a fraction of the time, just as promised.
We didn't stop there though. Next up was a 5-pound pork roast. The standard recipe called to roast the meat in the oven for 1 hour and 15 minutes at 325 degrees. The Puck Oven promised to pressure cook that same cut in just 35 minutes.
Again, the Puck Oven delivered a fully-cooked, fully satisfying cut of meat. This time, however, our taste testers weren't quite as impressed, unanimously finding the control pork I cooked in the convection oven to be a little juicier and more flavorful than what the Puck Oven produced. Still, given that it only took about a half an hour to cook, I was more than pleased.
The Puck Oven was proving to be a very capable pressure cooker, and one with a few intriguing advantages over the kind of standard, stovetop pressure cooker that my mother uses to make top notch pot roast. First, unlike that pressure cooker, the Puck Oven has a window, which means that you won't need to open it up just to see how your food is coming along. Second, the Puck Oven also boasts a bigger capacity, claiming it can fit a turkey as big as 14 pounds.
I just had to test this out, so I picked up the biggest turkey I could find that would still theoretically fit into the Puck Oven. It weighed in at 13.3 pounds, and after a few days defrosting, barely fit into the roasting pan that Chef Puck includes with his pressure cooker. I had my doubts about whether or not I'd be able to fit the bird inside the oven's cavity -- but I was just able to squeeze it in. Of course, fitting that large of a turkey was only the first part of the oven's claim. Now, it had to actually cook the thing.
The Puck Oven claims it'll cook a 13-pound turkey in 55 minutes, as opposed to 3 hours and 45 minutes in a regular oven. So, setting the timer for 55 minutes, I pulled the lever, sealed the valve, and crossed my fingers.
Watching the turkey cook, I could tell that the size was working against me. The top of the bird was nearly smushed directly against the healing element, so it browned up a little faster than the bottom half of the bird. Whereas the oven was able to cook an 8-pound chicken quite evenly, a 13-pound turkey was perhaps proving to be too much of a challenge. At 55 minutes, I pulled it out and found plenty of cold spots on the bird's bottom half, so I put it back in for an extra 15 minutes.
Fortunately, those extra 15 minutes did the trick, as the turkey was fully cooked after spending an hour and 10 minutes in the Puck Oven. While not quite the sixty minutes or less I'd been hoping for, it was still an impressive result (it didn't hurt that it tasted pretty great, as well.)
Conclusion
The Wolfgang Puck Pressure Oven can't promise a breathtaking design or a flawless user experience, and it isn't a futuristic, feature-rich countertop multi-cooker like the
What you're paying for here is performance. The Puck Oven cooks fast, and it cooks well. None of the food I prepared in it came out unsatisfying, and all of it came out in a fraction of the time it would have taken if I had used a conventional oven. If you're a busy home chef who enjoys putting slow-roasted meats on the table, but doesn't always have enough time, then it deserves your consideration.