Roast a Chicken With Your Voice
By: Thomas Smith
Tags: Cooking, Gadgets, Tech, Amazon, Amazon Smart Oven

Roast a Chicken With Your Voice

Photos courtesy of Thomas Smith

A Wi-Fi-connected, voice-controlled, smart microwave sounds like a bad tech joke from 2004. I can almost picture some cruise ship comedian at the time saying, “A phone in your pocket? What’s next? A microwave that goes on the internet?” to the muffled, polite chuckles of a distracted crowd busy wolfing down buffet prime rib. When I recently learned that such a product actually exists — and that you could get it on Amazon for $249.99 — I knew I absolutely could not live without it.

The Amazon Smart Oven is a combination microwave, food warmer, air fryer, and convection oven with built-in Wi-Fi connectivity. The oven connects to your home network, allowing you to control its cooking functions using your voice and Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant. You can use your own Alexa-enabled device (such as an Amazon Echo) or press an “Ask Alexa” button on the oven itself and speak to it directly.

The “Ask Alexa” button on the Smart Oven.

The Smart Oven includes other tech-enabled features to help you cook better, like an insertable probe that measures your food’s internal temperature and an app-based scanner that lets you automatically cook selected items from Whole Foods, Marie Callender’s, and Gardein by scanning their barcodes.

Reviews on Amazon describe the Smart Oven as “quite large” and (more negatively) as “45 pounds of disappointment.” Calling the oven large is an understatement. I only found one adjective adequate to describe its size: ginormous. It’s so big and heavy (50+ pounds in its massive, bulky box) that you technically need two people to lift it safely. I haven’t done a proper deadlift since gyms closed in March, so I welcomed the opportunity to schlep the oven into my home. But if I’d had to go up a flight of stairs, I definitely would have enlisted a helper.

Even out of the box, the Smart Oven is still massive. Ages ago in high school, our student newspaper had a monopoly on selling concessions for our school’s football games. Every Saturday — in a move that a savvy insurance company really should have banned— we were set loose in the cafeteria’s commercial kitchen to prepare hundreds of institutional-grade hamburgers using gigantic commercial ovens. The Smart Oven feels a bit like these ovens. It has a hefty, industrial feel and a massive, thick black power cord that screams to your other appliances, “Move over, toaster. Daddy’s home.”

My Smart Oven arrived on the day after Thanksgiving, which couldn’t possibly have been better timing. For those who hail from elsewhere, the day after Thanksgiving is a sacred time in Americans’ year where we spend a whole day reheating and slowly eating leftover food from the previous day’s feast. There have even been attempts to declare it National Leftovers Day. After a brief setup process using the Alexa app, I had our Smart Oven connected to Wi-Fi installed in my 1980s-era kitchen and ready to use.

Like older, dumber microwaves, the Smart Oven has a traditional keypad. But it also has full Alexa voice control, which means you can pop a plate into the oven and then say something like “Alexa, microwave for 45 seconds,” and the oven will spring to life and do your bidding.

My father in law likened the oven to a gadget from The Jetsons. It’s an apt comparison because controlling a microwave using your voice feels like stepping into the future — but the Smart Oven also captures some of the technological pointlessness that made The Jetsons funny. Is it really so much hassle to enter a cooking time using the keypad on your microwave? No. Does it feel much better and cooler to do it with your voice? Emphatically yes.

Traditional microwaves often have a button or two for presets like “Popcorn” or “Pizza” (which says a lot about Americans’ eating habits). The Smart Oven takes this much further. While it has basic presets for these kinds of foods, you can also ask it to cook a variety of other things. You can say, for example, “Alexa, microwave jasmine rice,” and the oven will dial in the proper cooking time for your side dish.

Other reviewers have pointed out that these features can be a bit wonky. If you ask the Smart Oven to reheat coffee, for example, Alexa will ask you how many ounces you’d like to reheat. As Joy Ray of Wired writes in their review, while testing these functions, “confusion and frustration reigned.”

“Quick,” Ray asks rhetorically, “how many ounces does your favorite coffee mug hold? What about your backup mug or that giant one in the back of the cupboard? … When I asked Alexa to ‘reheat coffee,’ it asked ‘what’s the volume of coffee?’ I had no idea.”

The implicit question here is what kind of person knows the volume of their favorite coffee mug?

My answer? I am that kind of person. My coffee mug holds 12 ounces. I know this because one time years ago I was curious, so I filled my favorite mug with coffee, carefully poured it into a Pyrex measuring cup with a graduated scale, measured its volume precisely, poured it back into my mug, and went on with my morning routine.

The Smart Oven is not for everyone. But it is for a particular kind of person. If you never use smart devices, you should probably dip your toes into the world of home automation with a simpler gadget, like a smart plug. But if you already love automating processes, gathering data, and measuring things, the Smart Oven will be right up your alley.

There are other practical reasons to own a Smart Oven. I found that the device is a capable microwave, but it also integrates a full convection oven, which can bake a pie or a casserole. If you’re an avid cook and you’re moving somewhere without a traditional oven (like a dorm room or studio apartment), the Smart Oven would make a fantastic replacement. Based on its reviews, the Smart Oven also appears to have found an interesting niche among legally blind users who value the fact that they can control it via their voices — as well as that it comes with an optional Braille overlay to make activating voice control easier.

Perhaps the most compelling function of the Smart Oven, though, is a preset function that allows you to use the oven and your voice to roast a whole chicken. If the oven itself feels like a bad tech joke from 2004, then this feature feels like a bad tech joke from today: “Alexa can tell us the news and turn off our lights. What’s next? Cooking us dinner?” There’s really no practical reason why you’d need to initiate chicken-cooking using your voice. But again, that’s at least 90% of the fun of doing so.

Roasted chicken is one of my signature dishes, and I have a well-honed chicken recipe I’ve developed over many years. So my standards for roasted chicken are high. On a weeknight in early December, I decided to see how the Smart Oven’s chicken would stack up. I began with a raw Mary’s chicken from Whole Foods. I wanted to give the Smart Oven every advantage—Mary’s makes the best chickens, and at almost $19, the chicken’s cost was about 10% of the oven’s.

Amazon provides very little in terms of specific cooking instructions for your smart roasted chicken, so I’ll do it for them. Take out the giblets, and dry the inside and outside of the chicken with paper towels. Season it liberally with salt and (optionally) pepper. Place it breast side up on the air fryer pan and low roasting rack provided with the oven. Find the Smart Oven’s temperature probe, and insert it into the breast meat, staying away from the bone. Put the chicken and pans in the oven, and plug in the probe.

Raw Mary’s chicken with a probe in the Smart Oven.

Next, you get to say the magic words “Alexa, roast a whole chicken.” Alexa will ask for the weight of your chicken, and then the oven will preheat and begin to cook (it uses the convection setting for roasting, not the microwave, so the metal probe is safe). I usually use a meat thermometer when I roast a chicken, but I’m lazy about checking it. I’ll meander into the kitchen every 20 minutes or so, open the oven, take a peek, and keep roasting until it reads about 170 degrees and the chicken looks right.

Roasting a chicken with the Smart Oven is a totally different experience. Like most things Amazon, it’s extremely data-driven. With the embedded temperature probe, the oven constantly reports on the temperature of your chicken and the temperature of the oven’s interior throughout the cooking process. You can even pull up the Alexa app on your phone and see the temperature numbers update live from anywhere (you shouldn’t leave your house while roasting a chicken, of course).

Alexa estimated that my five-pound chicken would take about one hour and 40 minutes to roast. By default, the oven roasts to an internal temperature of 175 degrees Fahrenheit, which is about 10 degrees higher than the USDA’s recommended safe temperature for poultry. This is probably intended to provide a margin of error in case you inserted the temperature probe incorrectly or something else goes wrong in the roasting process. After about an hour and 20 minutes, my chicken had reached 175 degrees.

The oven was still going, and I was unclear about whether it was actually roasting or just keeping the chicken warm, so I shut it off, unplugged the probe, and plated my chicken. I also tested it with a normal meat thermometer. It registered a much lower temperature than the Smart Oven’s probe (165 degrees) — still safe but just barely. My family sat down to dinner to see how it turned out.

The finished chicken.

The verdict? Our smart-roasted chicken was pretty good but not on the level of a properly roasted chicken made in a real oven. It definitely tasted like it had been cooked by a robot. Internally, it seemed just barely done — safe and with clear juices but not quite the firm-fleshed texture of a perfectly cooked bird.

The biggest letdown was the skin. My normal chicken-roasting procedure calls for starting at 425 degrees for 30 minutes to crisp the skin before reducing the temperature to 350 degrees to finish the cooking process. Because the Smart Oven roasts at one temperature and uses convection instead of the radiant heat of a real oven, the skin came out a bit soggy and unsatisfying.

Still, I’m probably splitting hairs here. Comparing the visual work of a generative A.I. system to the Mona Lisa wouldn’t be fair nor is comparing a computer-roasted chicken to one roasted the right way (yes, I consider a well-roasted chicken and the works of Leonardo da Vinci to be equal in caliber — sue me). A rotisserie chicken from the supermarket is probably a fairer foil. Compared with that, Alexa’s auto-roasted chicken was far better.

That reveals something else fundamental about the Amazon Smart Oven. Most reviews of the device look at it in a vacuum and focus on the inherent silliness of buying a kitchen appliance you control with your voice. But really, you shouldn’t look at the Smart Oven on its own — you should compare it with other similar microwaves.

Doing this kind of comparison, the Smart Oven makes a lot more sense. Toshiba, for example, makes a comparably sized microwave with convection features and a smart temperature probe. It retails for $199.99. That’s only about $50 less than the Smart Oven. The real question, then, isn’t “does the Smart Oven deserve to exist?” but rather “would I pay $50 to add voice control and smart features to my microwave?”

For me, the answer is an enthusiastic yes. If you’re in the market for a new microwave and you already use Alexa — or you just can’t resist the idea of speaking to your kitchen appliances — then the Amazon Smart Oven is a great buy for you, too. And if you want a terrific gravy recipe to go with your robot-roasted chicken, reach out, and let’s talk.