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Rating:

7/10

Tovala is a meal-delivery service. It is also an oven. And in some ways, it also feels like a very specific vision of the future. Tovala is not quite a robot chef, exactly. But it's not not a robot chef, either. It's a robot chef as imagined in old science fiction, or an episode of Wallace and Gromit.

The idea behind Tovala is simple. You get a box in the mail with a full complement of ingredients, boxed up individually alongside vacuum-packed proteins. Here is your Parmesan-Crusted Chicken Breast with Cheesy Stuffed Shells and Garlic Bread. Or here is your Togarashi Chicken Breast and Sweet Soy Noodles.

The only cooking implement you will need to prep your food is a pair of scissors to open the little bags. Then, deposit each ingredient in the proper place into a series of aluminum trays, and pop them in the Tovala oven. Hold up a little QR code to a laser on the oven, and the little combi-smart oven will do the rest—moving itself through a series of preprogrammed steps. The oven steams, it convects, it broils, it bakes, all of its own accord.

It's ingenious in its way, one of very few meal kits to offer such simple preparation while still offering a genuine fresh-cooked meal. (And I should know. I've tested 20 meal-delivery services in the past year.) But when I first tested the Tovala meal kit and oven last year, I noted that the little oven had one very serious limitation: It only made one meal at a time. This capped its potential audience to solo diners or couples who don't mind eating consecutively.

Tovala has responded this year with family meals, which implausibly manage to stuff two to four often hefty servings into a single tiny countertop oven. I tried five, ranging from Italian sausage and gnocchi to togarashi chicken. They are often delicious, with surprisingly juicy meat, full flavor, and simple saucing. But nutrition will be in the eye of the beholder: It's a lot like eating restaurant meals every day.

Each meal costs anywhere from $9 to $13 a serving, plus an $11 delivery charge per box. In exchange for buying meals for six weeks, you get a hefty discount on a powerful little oven, whose app also offers guidance on a number of other mostly automated recipes—including surprisingly excellent runny eggs to drape over avocado toast.

How Tovala Works

Tovala is an outlier in the world of meal-delivery services, in that the company seems to want to completely change the way you cook at home. For this, you will require the specialized Tovala smart oven, either the $299 original oven or an upgraded Smart Oven Pro ($349) equipped with a steam function. I highly recommend that you spring for the steam oven, assuming you like juicy meat or good toast.

But it's doubtful you'll pay full price for the oven. If you order six weeks of meals from the Tovala meal plan, you end up with a hefty discount, down to $119 for the Pro and just $69 for the non-steaming original. To further sweeten the pot, Tovala offers a 100-day money-back guarantee if you don't like your oven—amply more time than you'd need to try your six weeks of meals if you'd like.

Most recipes take from 15 minutes to a half hour, then out pops a surprisingly moist chicken breast crusted with whatever spices or crust you happened to put on it. The same goes for a mountain of saucy gnocchi, or a luxuriantly thick cut of filet mignon. Each will taste, perhaps, a little better than expected—and certainly better than nearly all preprepared meals that involve a microwave.

Indeed, among the many meal-delivery services I've tested, Tovala perhaps comes closest to what many people imagine when they think of the words “meal kit.” Assembly is easy, the food is fresh, and the oven offers plenty of labor-saving help.

Each week's box from Tovala contains anywhere from four to a dozen meals, with $11 per box in shipping. So if you ordered the bare minimum of four single-serving meals, you'll pay $63 a week. This amounts to more than scratch cooking, of course, but less than takeout. Serving size for each meal ranges from 500 calories to a thousand.

There are about 45 options each week, but very few of these will be vegetarian. Carb-conscious or “gluten-friendly” options fare better, but note that Tovala does not promise full-gluten safety if you're celiac.

If you're not making a Tovala meal—or one of the myriad recipes on the Tovala app that don't require meal delivery—the oven is not much of an air fryer but otherwise competitive with some of the best countertop ovens on the market. Heat is precise and mostly even, as measured with temperature probes. The app offers programmed recipes for even basic ingredients, with steam cycles to keep food from drying out. The oven also makes excellent toast as long as you remember to use the middle rack of the oven. (If you use the bottom rack, you'll scorch your bread.)

Family Style Prep

I mostly enjoyed the single-serve meals I tried last year from Tovala. I cheerily praised in particular a red-wine braised filet mignon and a "tandoori-spiced” chicken and chickpea salad that arrived with a drizzle of mint chutney. An almond-dusted meat and quinoa bowl was drizzled pleasantly with cilantro chimichurri.

But until somewhat recently, Tovala's meals were a single-serve affair, ruling out families or maybe even couples who like to eat together. And so its audience was much more limited. Newer family-style meals change this math considerably.

About four meal options each week, for now, offer four-serving options. Each costs less per serving than the single-serve meals despite not skimping on calories, about $9 a serving—or $36 for the meal box. Note that even though they cost more, family meals only count as one “meal” if you've signed up for four meals a week. You may have to adjust the total number of meals you receive each month to compensate.

I was initially skeptical that Tovala would manage to fit four decent-sized servings in its small oven. The meal service achieves this, somewhat ingeniously, by using up every square inch of the oven's bottom rack and air-frying basket simultaneously to cook generous four-serving meals—usually with the help of aluminum baking trays that can be tiled four to a layer.

I worried this might disrupt air flow, but meals were mostly appropriately cooked. As robo-chefs go, Tovala is pretty well calibrated.

If prep on the single-serve meals is usually less than three minutes–just a matter of snipping and emptying plastic bags in the right places—prep on the four-person meals involves four times as many bags. Expect about 10 minutes of squeezing proteins and sauces, or dappling spice powders and cheese into the right places.

High Flavor, High Sodium

As might be expected when jamming so much into the oven, there is a little bit of compromise–or at least a bit less flexibility. Most of the meals fell into the “large protein plus" category. A teriyaki chicken, a parmesan chicken, and a togarashi chicken all involve pretty much the same brined and vacuum-packed chicken breast.

All arrive with different saucing but approximately the same texture: It tastes and feels like steamed chicken, moist but without any particular browning. This worked out best with a Parmesan chicken whose cheese browned in the oven and added a little texture.

A garlic-herb salmon with risotto was probably the best among the family meals I tried. The chopped asparagus was less than visually appealing when drizzled in garlic butter, but still tasty and a bit crisp. The salmon was tender and flaky. And the sweet pea risotto had no choice but to be delicious. There was so much cheese, butter, and lemon it was pretty much a concert of fats and acid.

That chicken parm was likewise a mountain of cheese and salt. It reminded me, pleasantly, of countless family meals I had as a child in the 1980s: cheese-topped chicken, garlic bread, shells stuffed with ricotta and topped with even more cheese. The big difference is that there is simply no way my mother would have cooked this meal without a vegetable.

And nutrition is where Toval runs aground a little. The nutritional notes on that chicken parm meal betray 2,300 milligrams of sodium per serving, pretty much the entire daily allowance for an adult human. This is also on par with comparable servings of Stouffer's meat lasagna. The Tovala meal also carried about 10 times the cholesterol as Stouffer's.

Many other meals followed a similar pattern, loading up on fats and salt in order to make meals tasty. The net effect is that it's a lot more like rich restaurant food than what most people prepare at home. Whether this is a good or a bad quality is up to you.

Only one meal of the seven I tried failed utterly: I flagged a teriyaki chicken dinner to my editor as a possible cultural crime against Japan. The meal was sweet soy drenching pale and steaming chicken, with an implausible side of thick egg rolls and some loose, unseasoned broccoli. It felt like the “Japanese” food you'd get at a mall food court in the '90s. But again, this was a rare major misstep.

A more pernicious issue, in meals designed for the whole family, is the near-universal high-fat, cholesterol, and sodium content. Many with the income and inclination to eat hearty, low-effort meals like the ones from Tovala are either parents with children, or people in the retirement bracket. Each has their own reason to desire a little more nutrition, and less fat and salt.

By the end of a couple of weeks of testing recipes, I'll admit I felt a little relieved. I was grateful to feel my arteries slowly reopen. Tovala's culinary model makes a lot of sense to me, as a smart way of splitting the difference between prepared meals and fresh food. And the company has proven it can cook well. It might be nice if they'd also cook a diet that felt more sustainable.

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