Dreo ChefMaker Combi Fryer Review

Air fryers consistently produce results that are crispy on the outside and tender on the inside, in less oil than frying and in less time than baking. The $359 Dreo ChefMaker Combi Fryer is more expensive than your typical model, but it can slow roast, brown, toast, and even (regular) sous vide. It has its own temperature probe to cook meat properly and offers multiple ways to program automatic or step-by-step cooking as you wish. It’s a powerful multi-function cooking smart appliance worth considering if you haven’t joined the air fryer cult yet, though you might want to consider the cheaper Tovala Smart Oven ($249) instead. It’s no steam or sous vide, but it has its own air frying feature in a countertop-friendly design with more cooking space, earning it our Editors’ Choice award.

Design: A 6-quart, dishwasher-safe basket

The Chefmaker looks like a simple (albeit upscale) air fryer. It is a silver box measuring 15.7 by 14.7 by 10.6 inches (HWD), a black pull-out basket with a black glass touch surface in the lower three-quarters of the front panel and a black glass touch surface in the upper quarter.

The basket has a 6-quart capacity with a 5.1-by-8.9-by-8.9-inch cavity. It’s intended for use with the included flat cooking tray or grilling rack, so expect height clearance for food of about 4.2 inches with the tray or 3 inches with the grilling rack. It’s plenty of space if you’re cooking for two, but more than that and you’re pushing it. The Tovala Smart Oven, by comparison, has an 8-by-12.8-by-11-inch cavity. If you want more space, you can fit an entire chicken in the $599 Anova Precision Oven, which has a 1.2-cubic-foot cavity.

All three ingredients are nonstick and dishwasher safe, an advantage of the Chefmaker over the Tovala Smart Oven. The front of the pull-out basket has a sturdy black handle and is made of dark glass instead of metal like the rest, so you can see what’s cooking by turning on the ChefMaker’s internal light. The front edge of the basket has a small groove with contacts on the inside to snap into the included thermometer probe, which is not dishwasher safe.

The top panel of the ChefMaker has a small, square water reservoir for the water atomization (aka steaming) feature that can be removed for washing. The Tovala Smart Oven doesn’t have a water tank for steam cooking, but its upgraded version, the $349 Smart Oven Pro, does.

Chefmaker Mode: Cook the way you want

Plug in the ChefMaker and the front panel will light up, revealing a 4-inch color LCD with two sets of four buttons. The left set includes power and light buttons and up and down buttons for navigating the ChefMaker’s menu and adjusting the temperature. The right set has start/pause and back buttons and up and down buttons that allow you to set the cooking time and can also be used to navigate the menu.

The LCD is not a touch screen, but the onboard interface is easy to use. The main menu offers five options: three cooking modes (Chef Mode, Classic Cook and Probe Cook), a list of preferences and a settings menu. Chef Mode is an automatic cooking mode that uses temperature probes or pre-programmed settings to cook a variety of beef, lamb, pork, poultry, seafood and vegetables. For many meats, this will instruct you to attach the probe to the basket and insert it into the thickest part of the meat. Depending on the type of meat, it may ask you to choose whether you want a classic roasted finish or a juicy sous vide style. This will then tell you if your reservoir needs to be topped up. With everything set, all you have to do is press the start/pause button and ChefMaker will start cooking.

Classic Cook and Probe Cook are more granular modes based on how you want to cook rather than what you’re cooking. Classic Cook lets you choose whether you want to air fry, bake, broil, defrost, dehydrate, reheat, roast or toast, then presents an ambient temperature and cooking time combination that you can adjust. Probe Cook doesn’t let you control the cooking time, but instead lets you set a target internal temperature for the probe to detect the cavity’s ambient temperature and control whether you want to go low and slow or risk cooking faster. charring They are both easy to set, but a physical knob to quickly adjust the time and temperature would have been nice here.

The Dreo app for Android and iOS lets you control ChefMaker with your phone, update firmware and perform maintenance like draining the water system and even descale it. It offers access to the same three cooking modes as the machine and a fourth Creative Cook mode.

Creative Cook lets you set up multi-step recipes that use ChefMaker’s various functions. You can set up a list of cooking steps using five different blocks: Classic, Probe, Slow Roast, Sous Vide and Rest. Classic and Probe are effectively the same functions as their respective modes. Slow Roast and Sous Vide For cooking over an hour at a particularly low temperature, slow roast uses only time and sous vide uses a probe. Resting allows the dish to rest as long as you like. Different cooking modes can be customized based on ambient temperature, target internal temperature or time, and most modes let you toggle water atomization if you want to keep what you’re cooking moist. Arrange the blocks as you wish, then optionally add a sixth browning block as part of a separate, final stage that cooks briefly at high heat.

You can share your Creative Cook recipes with other ChefMaker users via the eight-character code provided by the app. In addition to creating your own recipes and getting new ones from friends, you can browse complete recipes with instructions in the Dreo app’s Kitchen+ tab. These recipes will tell you how to make the entire dish and even show photos of each step, and you can send the cooking process to ChefMaker with a tap. Recipes aren’t shared through Creative Cook mode though, so you can’t preview different cooking steps and their settings and adjust them as you wish. In fact, almost all of the cooking instructions in the recipes on the Kitchen+ tab seem to rely on Chef Mode cooks.

The result: hot and juicy food

I made a lamb shank and a chuck roast in ChefMaker using their respective Chef Mode settings. They are both properly cooked and juicy, not tough like they can sometimes be in the oven. The chefmaker kept them moist while cooking, finished them with a thick outer layer that wasn’t quite seared, and let them rest before even letting me know. During each cook, both the app and the device’s screen keep me up to date and display the estimated remaining cook time for probe-based cooking. The app reliably notified me when ChefMaker was done. You still shouldn’t leave any cooking equipment completely unattended, but it was handy to have a buzzer on my phone while I was on the sofa.

While steaks are one of the chefmakers’ claims to fame, getting the kind of work you want can take some trial and error. I cooked a London broil using the chuck steak setting in Chef mode, set to medium-well and conventional cooking instead of sous vide. The result was a very moist steak that dripped with juices. It was probably a little too moist for my taste, but part of that was rubbing the steak with butter as suggested. It kept the juices, but didn’t improve the sear as suggested. I’m sure some manual changes and perhaps setting two cooking stages, a probe-based one for overall performance and then a quick high heat cook, would improve the results for my taste.

Of course, the Chefmaker is an air fryer, so I also made some breaded chicken nuggets and potatoes in it. Predictably, they are crispy and cooked without ending up dry. There’s a reason air fryers are popular.

Verdict: Much more than an air fryer

The Dreo ChefMaker Combi Fryer packs multiple cooking methods into a single device, with some powerful automatic and programmable ways to use all those methods. It’s a good air fryer on its own and can roast and even sous vide thanks to its water tank and atomizer, and its meat probe helps make sure whatever you’re cooking reaches the right temperature, whether you’re fast or high or low and slow, for $359. It is much more expensive than a traditional air fryer or countertop convection oven, but it is much more flexible and useful than either. That said, we like the Tovala Smart Oven quite a bit, which costs less and offers more cooking space, making it our Editors’ Choice for small kitchen appliances.

About Will Greenwald

Principal Analyst, Consumer Electronics

I’ve been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over 10 years, covering TVs and everything you want to connect them with. I’ve reviewed over a thousand different consumer electronics products, including headphones, speakers, TVs, and every major game system and VR headset of the last decade. I’m an ISF-certified TV calibrator and a THX-certified home theater professional, and I’m here to help you understand 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and even 8K (and to assure you that you won’t do it for at least a few more have to think about 8K for the year).

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