Café – Couture Smart Toaster Oven with Air Fry – Matte White

GE Café Couture Smart Toaster Oven with Air Fry – Stainless Steel
If your objective is to have the appearance of a gourmet, professional-looking kitchen, you’ve arrived. There can be no doubt with this stunning appliance sitting on a counter. After using the GE Café Couture for a good number of meal preparations, we know that this isn’t just about good looks. The Café thankfully also has a whole lot of features, functions and exceptional performance. There’s a lot to like here.
SETUP and OPERATION: We prefer to plug in any of our newest appliances and be cooking in mere seconds. And so we did. This GE Café is thoughtfully intuitive. We turned the MODE DIAL and across the bright and easily read LED screen we could select from Air Fry, Bake, Broil, Roast, Toast, Bagel, Frozen Pizza, Cookies, Proof, Dehydrate, Slow Cook, Reheat, Keep Warm, and CrispFinish. Select your MODE. We chose BAKE, initially. Press the TEMP/TIME dial to toggle between each control. Once selected, turning the dial is either modifying the TIME or TEMPERATURE. So very easy. Adding a crispy finish, or melting cheese, etc is as easy as pressing the CRISP FINISH button (Lower right corner of DISPLAY.)
The instructions, if you want details and guidance, are very well done with easily read, easily visible text size. (The COOKING MODES TABLE is too useful not to enlarge, laminate, and provide as the backside of a cook’s QUICK START). I’ll do that myself. (… but, think about it, GE.)
There is a large cooking cavity heated with 6 halogen cooking tubes and the actual oven is pretty large. As you can see from my pictures, it looks right at home on any kitchen counter, but GE discourages placing this toaster oven under typical kitchen top cabinets with less than 4″ clearance or on top of a surface that isn’t heat resistant. (“Ensure the oven has at least 4″ (10cm) of clearance on all sides.”)
External dimensions are 18.6″ W x 14.0″ H x 17.0″ D
Internal dimensions are 13.1″ W x 5.0″ H x 12.4″ D
Included: Oven rack, 12″ enamel non-stick pizza pan, enamel non-stick coated baking pan, wire mesh air-fry/dehydrate basket, and removable crumb tray (at base of fryer).
There’s a great cookbook of curated meals, desserts, and sides included, with helpful directions for this oven.
You can watch your brightly lit food cook using the switch-controlled interior light. (Upper LEFT corner of display)
There is a SmartHQ app which enable control some useful features using your phone connected to Wi-Fi or Google and Alexa. When connected to a WiFi network, you can adjust oven temperature, add or reduce cooking time, and/or stop a cooking cycle. While there is a way to START cooking remotely, I’m going to advise, don’t. [I started the process of setting up an account, getting verified, and ran out of patience at the “enter the oven password.” Wow. My bank is less secure. I’ll come back and finish.
PERFORMANCE:
1- We needed to warm up some frozen rolls and microwaving is awful for this task. Getting quickly to a BAKE mode yielded a nicely warmed roll, ready for my tuna sandwich. I was tempted to add cheese and CRISP FINISH, but maybe next time.
2- Toasting another sliced-in-half roll resulted in nicely colored, evenly toasted halves. Perfect. We do that regularly, as you can see in the BAGEL TOAST picture.
3- Dinner tonight was bone-in pork chops. I prefer to start in a cast iron pan for a few minutes each side to seal in the juices. The GE Cafe was pre-heating to 375 degrees and was ready to finish my chops, which needed an 8 minutes bake or roasting to complete. Super well cooked, and no need to heat up our full-size oven. There has to be some energy savings here. We use the same technique on swordfish and tenderloin and this oven will make finishing them easier, with less energy.
4- French fries are the go-to test for the Air-Fryer. The AIR FRYER uses the built in fan and operates at a noise level of only 53dB. This is a quiet Air Fryer. You won’t be waking the baby with this one. Oh, and the fries were great.
5- Our test pizza was a dairy-free, high veggie count (artichoke/chicken/bacon) freshly made (uncooked) 12” specimen from a popular chain. This is a challenge for a home oven because it is wet, dense, and cooking needs vary from top to bottom. We followed the same directions as always, using the BAKE mode. 425 degrees, but a shorter than usual 16 minutes. We added 60 seconds CRISP at the very end. The results were perfect. We required probably 4 minutes less time than usual in our standard oven but this was a more even result with less fussing. This really worked out better and easier than we thought.
6- Compared to our previous Air Fryers there is an obvious difference related the size of the GE Café. This extra capacity allows for a broader, larger, repertoire of foods and meal sizes the can be prepared. And, as expected, some cooking speed is sacrificed. But very little. The convection fan is a great leveler.
7- I know there will comments about a rotisserie. Not from us. It’s a feature that invites reliability issues. More practically, we really don’t want to buy the smaller chickens necessary to use such a feature and we certainly hate the cleanup. It’s just our opinion.
8- The SmartHQ app is nice to have. Will we use it? We find cooking to be a hands-on experience. What makes the GE Café so much fun is the flexibility and intuitive changes-on-the-fly it offers and the big viewing window. While the App offers all that flexibility at a distance (even if from a patio or TV room 20 feet away) it frustrates the senses. So, unless GE is going to add a video camera to the cooking cavity, we won’t be using the App.
SUMMARY: It would be silly to claim you have to spend this much money to achieve a high level of cooking performance. There are a number of really competent air fryer/ovens for your purchasing dollars. (We’ve owned a few). The GE Café Couture Smart Toaster Oven with Air Fry brings something special into your kitchen. It’s a whole ‘nother step above premium build quality and fun to show off. It could become the star of the kitchen (if we didn’t have a full size Monogram oven pair further down the counter). Performance must be perfection at this price and from we’ve witnessed, it sure is. Evenness of toasting is spot on. Convection (and related Air Frying) cooking is fast, predictable, repeatable and QUIET. The CRISP FINISH works great to get that extra brown crust on crab cakes or steaks frozen treats. It finishes off a pizza for picture perfect presentation. In our kitchen, the toaster over, air fryer combination is far and away the most used appliance. It has supplanted the microwave and cooktop. It had better do it all, and do it perfectly. We feel good about the GE Café Couture Smart Toaster Oven being in our kitchen. We recommend it highly.

The Couture Oven is my second smart countertop kitchen appliance from Café, and I really like it a lot. It has an upscale brushed stainless-steel finish with modern copper accented dials and door handle, and a large, bright LCD. The chunky feet in each corner elevate it off the counter about ½” with enough room underneath to store the included pizza pan. They also allow the handle of the door to float just above your countertop when the door is opened, rather than smacking into it. Inside, there are three rack levels where you can utilize the included baking tray, wire rack, or 1” deep air fry basket.
The Couture takes up a decent amount of counter space at 14” tall, 17” deep and 18.5” wide. It also requires 4” of clearance at the back, sides, and top for ventilation, as these surfaces can get very hot, so you’ll need to budget for that when calculating space requirements. The trade-off is that you do get plenty of interior space, approximately 13” W, 5”H, and 12.5” D. That’s large enough to a fit a whole 12” pizza, quarter baking sheet, or 12” dual-handle cast iron pan.
The unit has four top and two bottom quartz heating elements that are loosely guarded by wire cages, though these will not prevent drips and spatters of food or liquid from landing on the elements. For this reason, I prefer to keep the baking tray in the lowest position as a drip tray, when possible, so long as it doesn’t impede the distribution of heat for my intended cooking activity. I also like that the wire rack has built-in feet on the bottom, so you can remove it from the oven to use as a cooling rack for your food as well. The included recipe book has a handful of delicious sounding recipes you can try, accompanied by appetizing photos.
The oven has 14 customizable modes: Air Fry, Bake, Broil, Roast, Reheat, Warm, Slow Cook, Dehydrate, Proof, Cookies, Pizza, Bagel, Toast, and Crisp Finish. Each mode has a range of times and temperatures to choose from, appropriate for that cooking method, for example, Air Fry lets you select from 200°F to 450°F and 1 minute up to an hour, while proof narrows the selection to 90°F to 200°F but you can run it for up to 24 hours. Select modes allow you to toggle convection on/off including Bake, Roast, Reheat, and Pizza, while other modes will always use convection, e.g. Air Fry, Slow Cook, and Bagel, or disable convection when it is not needed like for Warm, Proof, and Toast.
Adjusting the time and temp require turning the right-most dial, and the values do not loop if you try to turn past the min or max settings. To switch between time and temp you simply press the dial in, and to begin cooking, you’ll need to press the separate ‘Start’ button. Most modes will preheat first which takes about 10 minutes. Once preheated, the oven will beep to prompt you to place the food inside. If you don’t hear the beep, just check the progress bar, which will be full when it’s ready. You’ll need to press ‘Start’ again within 10 minutes of preheating in order to begin the timer countdown. If you miss this window, the oven will automatically shut off. You can disable preheating in the settings menu or simply press ‘Start’ again at any time during preheating to skip it and start the timer immediately.
The one function that this oven doesn’t have, that I use every so often, is rotisserie for cooking a whole chicken. However, I found I can achieve similar results using the Air Fry or Roast modes (with convection), as long as I turn the bird over halfway through cooking and once more at the end before using Crisp Finish. The Crisp Finish function is a one-touch button that you press next to the LCD, rather than using the mode dial, though you can adjust the time and temperature just like with any other mode.
Many of the modes are interchangeable and overlap in functionality, so for example, you can use the Bake mode in lieu of Cookies to make cookies, as long as you are able to select the same settings. The nice thing about having the separate modes though is that the machine will remember the time and temp selections that you used most recently for each mode. If you always want to reheat your food at 250°F for 5 minutes, then you just turn the dial to Reheat, and those settings will already be selected. This gives you potentially 14 different pre-sets you can have ready-to-go for your favorite foods.
During cooking, you can change the selected time and temp on-the-fly by simply turning the time/temp dial and selecting new values. You will not have to start/stop cooking to add or reduce time or temperature. Also, when you open the oven door during cooking, this will pause the timer until you close the door again (within 10 minutes), allowing you to check its doneness, add ingredients, or stir your food without losing any time. When the cook time runs out, the oven will automatically shut off the heating elements and go into standby after a brief 2 minute cool down.
The first thing I made in this oven was pumpkin muffins, as I wanted to make a half-dozen batch without needing to turn on my big oven. I choose to bake without convection following the recipe’s directions, then toggled on convection at the last few minutes to achieve evenly browned, lightly toasted tops. The nice part was that I didn’t need to turn/rotate the tray during baking, and there were no hot zones that caused any of the muffins to cook or brown more quickly than the others. It also performed well in a variety of cooking applications from roasting vegetables, melting cheese, and broiling salmon, to gently reheating leftovers without drying them out.
This unit is ideal for crisping up frozen fried foods too such as French fries, onion rings, and tater tots in the mesh air fryer basket. The results were delightfully crispy exteriors with hot, tender interiors, and I liked that you don’t need to stir or shake the contents of the basket, if you cook everything in 1 even layer (don’t stack!). The dedicated pizza mode also worked great for frozen pizza, however, I haven’t yet tried to make one from scratch in this mode.
The thing that makes this oven “smart” is the ability to connect it to your WiFi network and monitor and control cooking using the GE Smart HQ app. Setup takes only a few minutes, and the password for the appliance’s WiFi network is printed on a sticker on the back of the unit. For safety reasons, the oven can only be started remotely after pressing and holding the ‘Start’ button on the front of the machine for 3 seconds. You’ll have 10 minutes to choose the settings and start the machine from you mobile device before this ability expires. That makes sense since you don’t want to start the oven if you don’t know whether or not it’s safe to do so, however, this limits the situations in which this might actually be useful.
However, regardless of whether you started the oven remotely or manually, you can change the time and temp or cancel cooking using the app at any time. Changing the setting at the machine automatically updates in the app after a few seconds as well. Note though that if you try to change the cooking mode remotely, cooking will be cancelled, and you’ll need to start the machine again manually.
The only other feature I think would have been nice would have been an automatic keep warm option following cooking. You can, of course, simply use the ‘Warm’ mode after cooking, but it needs to be manually started. I like that the crumb tray at the bottom under the glass door is easily removed from the outside of the machine for cleaning and hand washing. All other removable accessories are dishwasher safe.
Overall, the Couture Oven does a very nice job cooking a variety of foods with fast preheating, accurate temperature control, and consistent evenness. I can accomplish many tasks with just one appliance like dehydrating fruits and vegetables, proofing dough, and toasting bread/bagels and use less energy for cooking in small batches when I don’t need to turn on my full-size oven. While the smart remote control feature is nice to have, its practicality is somewhat limited.

This GE product is just plain wonderful. The oven is very modern looking, and it fits well with my other stainless-steel kitchen appliances. To me, stainless-steel is always pleasing to the eye and always fits well with just about any type of style or kitchen you might have.

One great feature of this appliance is having so many cooking modes as well as a good range of cooking temperatures. I’m sure that one of the 14 cooking modes will meet all of your cooking needs, such as baking, crisping, toasting, reheating, warming, and so on.
One of my favorite foods is either frozen or homemade pizza. A 12-inch pizza easily fits into this appliance and the results were great. I tried a frozen pizza, and the results were terrific. It came out cooked to perfection, had great taste and was not burned. I love the fact that I don’t need to use my full-size oven and my kitchen temperature stayed a lot cooler. This is a big plus since I reside in South Florida.
One of our families’ other favorite foods are French fries. The crisping and cooking of our fries were superb. Since the basket has a mesh build to it, the air circulated around the fries evenly which made for a very uniform cooking experience. I did take caution as to not overload and layer to many fries at one time thereby ensuring even cooking.
The appliance cooks with numerous quartz heating elements. Heating up the oven is super quick and efficient. It has a bright digital display which is pretty good sized. For those older consumers, not having to wear a pair of glasses was very welcomed. This appliance does have a substantial footprint, so take caution as to the placement. Surfaces do get hot, so ensure you have the appropriate amount of ventilation and space when utilizing. Take note of your overhead kitchen cabinets to ensure you have enough room to prevent heat from transferring to them.
This appliance has the capability of WIFI controlled cooking. As of the date and time of this review I did not use this function. That being said, I may eventually use this function and post an update to this review. Just having this capability is cool when you think about it though.
A few thoughts on supplied baking tray, pizza tray and wire tray for air frying. The build and strength of the baking tray seems fine. It seems very sturdy. Wire basket tray for air frying seems to be on the flimsy side. I would have preferred the mesh to have been constructed on the thicker side. The reason that I am concerned with this is during the cleaning process. I wonder how many times one can put force on it with a steel wool pad before it starts to “bow”. Finally, the baking tray for pizza is completely flat and lacks sides. I would have like to see the “build” of the pizza tray include a lip or sides around the outside of the tray. This is just my personal preference though.
In closing, I’m loving this appliance. With its many capabilities, it easily replaced many of my counter-top appliances that I have such as my air fryer and stand-alone toaster oven. I experienced awesome performance, even and thorough cooking of my foods and great results.