My 10 Years with The NuWave Oven (Buy It!)
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One of the most amazing cooking devices that I’ve ever had was when I purchased this dome-shaped convection device from an infomercial late at night. It was called the NuWave Oven.
In this article, I want to give you the experience I had with the NuWave oven and how is his been my everything for nearly a decade.
What is the NuWave Oven?
The NuWave oven is a cooking appliance way before the time of today’s air fryers. In fact I would say that the NuWave Oven was one of the first in the market before air fryers became popular.
This device can perform three main features: infrared, conduction, and convection.
Infrared
Infrared is a type of electromagnetic radiation that has a wavelength it is right above the red end of the spectrum. It’s not particularly like microwaves since the wavelength ranges from 800 nanometer to 1 mm. Usually you’ll see the heated objects emit this radiation after being fired by it.
Infrared is also known as an alias for radiated heat. Some people would describe it as the feeling of warmth coming from the Sun or the heat from a burning coal or campfire. Infrared waves are capable of traveling through the air and when they touch any type of surface that heat is transferred to the object that it makes contact with.
The NuWave Oven in particular uses these specialized infrared rods that creates heat while at the same time Browning the outer layer and penetrating heat into the food.
Conduction
By definition, conduction is where heat is directly sent from one object to another without actually moving that object. You can think of it as if you’re holding a stick with a marshmallow at the end in front of an open campfire and as you place the marshmallow closer to the fire it begins to transfer that heat from the fire pit to the marshmallow burning it.
Another example of conduction is the active cooking food on the stove. As you place food on top of your pan, you begin to cook it by transferring Heat from the pan to the food.
The NuWave Oven has these heating elements right above the roof of the Dome that send blistering heat down to the top layer of the food you place inside.
Convection
Convection is very similar to air frying. It uses hot air to transfer and circulate heat throughout the Chamber of the NuWave Oven. This heat begins to cook the entire surroundings of the food all at once creating and even cook.
For convection to happen, there needs to be a fan. This fan is located right above the heating element and it spins pushing the heat that is coming from the heating element down into the chamber. The design of the NuWave Oven is a dome. It seals off most of the air with very little room for escape.
And as such, the extremely heated are circles around the chamber and heats up every inch of the exterior of your food that is not touching something else.
The New NUWAVE PRIMO Grill Oven
- It makes food delicious
- It's so easy to use
- It saves you a lot of time
- It can cook a lot of food
- It's lasted me over 10 years
- It's difficult to clean
- The dome is made of plastic
- It produces a lot of steam
- It requires a lot of space
What are the benefits of the NuWave Oven?
If you’re wondering why I believe the NuWave Oven was such a vital and amazing device all these years and let me break it down into the most important reasons I can ever think of.
It makes food delicious
This kitchen appliance is absolutely amazing. It’s able to cook all sorts of foods. Whatever proteins or vegetables you throw at it, all you need to do is put it in and turn it on for a few minutes and outcomes in amazing meal.
Now, I’m a horrible cook to be honest. I’m always burning things or under cooking things when it comes to stove top cooking. I never know when to gauge if the food is ready or not. Take for example of stir fry a chicken breast. I would get it to just looking good on the outside but then when me and my wife dig in, we’d find a bloody red interior. The meal would be completely ruined afterwards when we place it in the microwave just to cook the insides.
But this kind of thing doesn’t happen when you have a NuWave Oven. Simply place your chicken into the grill underneath the Dome and turn it on for a mirror 12 to 15 minutes on each side. The outcome is an amazingly brown, crisp outer layer of chicken that is internally and externally cooked perfectly.
Even if you were to look online and all the crazy reviews that the NuWave oven has amount to all these years, you still won’t believe it if you didn’t try it. This device has been replaced oven, our microwave, and even our toaster at times. It was the one device that did almost all of it.
It is cooked so well that the meat juices from the proteins remain sealed inside and only comes out when you bite into it. I can’t tell you how much I love using my NuWave Oven. We never needed to worry about whether the food was fully cooked or not when it came to using a NuWave Oven. Somehow, the Heat from the NuWave Oven was able to penetrate through the meats without over cooking the insides. That would be something you’d be prone to seeing if you use a microwave.
It’s so easy to use
God was this thing easy to use. The machine was default to a temperature of high and I never had to change that. The only other thing I ever had to worry about what how long I was going to cook buy food for.
Remember, I’m a horrible cook. But I did teach myself how to marinate food really well. I loved to experiment with all types of seasonings and I think I found that part to be the most enjoyable experience when it comes to cooking. With the NuWave Oven, the ability to season your own food to your own desire was all you really needed to complete one of the best meals you’ve ever had.
I merely had to place my seasoned meats and vegetables separately on the tray that was included and place it inside and Under the Dome. Cooking an amazing meal.
- Marinate your meats and vegetables
- Please sit inside the NuWave Oven
- Turn your NuWave oven on
- Leave it at default high heat
- Change the cooking time required
- Press the start button
- Pause midway during cooking
- Flip your proteins over and move your vegetables around
- Continue cooking until the timer runs out
Like I said, these are incredibly easy steps that you merely have to follow to get the absolute best flavors and texture from your meal. I need to tell you a secret though. The steps above are usually generic steps that most convection ovens will direct you to do. But the way I do it is a bit safer and easier.
Now, instead of having to manually go in and pause the cooking. What I do is that I determine the total time it takes to cook the entire meal. Let’s say it’s about 20 minutes. And, I know I need to flip it at some point in between the cooking process. So alternatively, I would break the cookie phases in 2 parts. The first part would be 75% of the total time, which is about 15 minutes. I crank the timer to 15 minutes and let it cook all on one side. Then, I would come back oh, flip the meat and vegetables over, and then add another 5 minutes.
What this does for me is but it helps me not have to worry about coming back and accidentally forgetting to flip over the food. If you get busy doing other things and you forget to flip over your food, then it’s probably already too late because it will continue cooking the entire 20 minutes. However, with this new method about it for a few extra minutes or so it will have already stopped cooking. The benefit here is that it is a dome and the Heat and moisture is still kept inside the Dome until you opened it up. So you don’t have to worry if you’ve forgotten about the food. You just have to come back within the next 20 minutes of it finishing its cook to flip over the food and cook it for another 25% all the time left over.
And what’s great about the NuWave oven is there’s very little variation to the steps that I explained above. Almost everything you cook in the NuWave oven is pretty much done in exactly the same method. You want to cook fish? Well, it’s the same. You want to cook roast beef? Again, it’s the same. How about green beans? Same. Potatoes? Same. Onions, broccoli, carrots, asparagus… all the same!
The only thing you really need to worry about is the marinating. In my honest opinion, marinating is probably the best part because when you’re at this stage, it’s really up to your imagination on how you want to marinate and prep your meal. You can use whatever resources, or look up what everyone is using, or you can even come up with your own concoctions of marinate.
One thing that’s for certain is that with my NuWave Oven, the cooking part was nothing I had ever had to worry about.
It saves you a lot of time
One of the biggest things that amazes and oppresses me about the NuWave oven is just how quickly it can cook your food for you. I’ll give you an example. Our kids absolutely love the frozen chicken nuggets that we buy from the freezer aisle at the grocery store. These things are great. They’re tasty, they’re organic, and they’re already pre-cooked and pre-battered bites of chicken protein that are as solid as a rock when you take them out of the freezer.
Guess how much time it takes to cook these things? Guess what I have to do before I place them into the NuWave Oven to cook them?
Well, it might surprise you that I do absolutely nothing with them other than placing them directly on top of the grill and underneath the NuWave dome right away. It’s kind of like that info commercial that has the slogan, you set it and forget it.
Once your food is inside the NuWave Oven you only have to trust it to do its job. And every single time since the day I’ve owned my NuWave Oven, it’s done its job in its entirety.
Because the NuWave Oven does all the rest of the job of cooking, I can spend more time doing other things. I can prepare a different meal that doesn’t necessarily require cooking with heat. I can toast some bread, I can mix up some drinks for my guests, I can even just sit back on the couch and watch TV with my timer set to my phone. I knew that deep down inside, I had nothing to worry about.
The point of all this is that the NuWave Oven saves you time to do other things. It keeps you more productive and able to complete more tasks at the same time. I know one thing that I worry about the most sometimes is how much time I have in a day. I think that’s something not a lot of people truly appreciate until time fleets away in the evening.
I can go on about my feelings and beliefs when it comes to saving as much time in your life as possible. But I’ll leave it at that. Just know that saving time it’s something the NuWave Oven does especially well. You definitely won’t regret it.
It can cook a lot of food
One other huge advantage to the NuWave oven is that it’s a very big device. I mean it could cook on entire chicken with ease.
The NuWave Oven that I purchased came with a dome that was about 15 in wide, in almost 14 in tall. Now that’s a whole lot of leg room. You can place practically anything inside. The grill that it came with had legs that suspended the food right into the air so that the oils and fats would drip to the bottom of the tray.
If you had something big like let’s say a medium-sized chicken, you can easily flip that Grill over on his head that allow the legs to stick up and you would have even more room to place the chicken on to.
This NuWave Oven unit had very little size limits. We are a medium sized family of five. And I’ve never once had to use the full capacity of the NuWave Oven. You can rest assure however that if you needed more space because you were hosting a party for a group of people oh, you can probably feed up to eight or ten people with a single round of cooking.
And even if you wanted to cook four more people using just the NuWave Oven, it’s so fast but you can easily cook in batches.
It’s lasted me over 10 years
Can you believe that I’ve used the NuWave Oven, the same exact one without any issue for over 10 years? Yeah it’s pretty crazy when you think about it. This device that I bought from an infomercial back in the day, was able to give me ten solid years great food with ease.
It did its job and it almost failed until the very end. Now, I could probably put this as a disadvantage but I’m going to keep it here in the advantages area. For device that I paid about $150 for had ended up providing me with delicious food for 10 years. That’s $15 a year. The return on investment here was a no-brainer.
I used it almost four to five times a week every night after getting home from work. I’ve used it several times a day during the weekend but I’m not going out to eat with friends and family. This device has been used literally several thousands of times.
At some point in the end, it just stopped turning on.
What are some of the things I hate most about the NuWave Oven?
Obviously, nothing is perfect. I can’t just give an appliance item my 100% guaranteed approval without giving you some of the downfalls of it. But keep in mind, it was hard coming up with these reasons. Frankly, I didn’t personally find these issues to be all that demanding or a deal-breaker when it came to buy in the NuWave Oven.
It is pretty hard to clean
I’d say the hardest part about using and owning a NuWave oven is the cleaning part. I’ll be honest with you, there were some days when I didn’t clean the NuWave Oven. The fats in the moisture that drip to the bottom of the tray remain there the next day and I went ahead and just cooked my new batch of food or reheated some leftovers right over it.
A lot of times, to avoid cleaning the NuWave Oven at all oh, I would place my food under a makeshift aluminum foil wrap that I turned into a tray. Let’s say if you were to cook some chicken drumsticks that were marinated overnight in your fridge. You can simply pull out a sheet of aluminum foil and sort of bend it in a way where it turns into a tray. And you can place this makeshift aluminum tray with chicken on it on top of the tray inside the NuWave Oven.
This little hack what’s a way for me to avoid cleaning the grill and the drip tray every time I used it. The fats and the juices would just simmer right under the drumsticks and add more flavor to it anyways.
However, over time of a week or two, there would be some buildup of residue from the food that you cook.
So the problem here lies in the sheer size of the NuWave Oven set. The Dome is huge like I explained previously in its dimensions. The tray underneath is also as wide and even though the grill was small, it’s a grill. And getting in between every single metal spoke is a chore. These things don’t even fully fit flat in side of my kitchen sink. You kind of have to angle them in a way where most of it can fit in your sink while you scrub it down and rinse them.
I would say this is the worst part of owning a NuWave Oven. It’s a good thing oh, that I never really cleaned it every single day. But don’t tell anyone I told you that.
The Dome is made of plastic
Now, I’ve heard about this several times and into many different groups but there are a few people who have complained that their plastic Dome had cracked after some years. This isn’t something that ever happened to me and I can assure you that I tapped on to this Dome several times. It’s pretty adorable.
My guess is that you would have to drop it from your chest with a little bit of for do you actually crack the dome.
Like I said, there are few people in our community that have actually complained about the Dome cracking and I believe they were able to get a replacement from the company. I’ve always been pretty careful with my NuWave Oven. I’ve never once dropped any of the accessories or the Dome itself on the floor. It’s always been pretty easy to handle and pretty easy to pick up.
How exactly did the Dome crack when reading other people’s experiences. I’ve never had the issue before so I can’t say anything further.
It produces a lot of steam
One of the other issues I’ve had with the NuWave oven is that once you’re done cooking, and you pull open the Dome, there’s this huge amount of steam that is released. I know, I know this is all a part of convection cooking inside a closed environment. This is why your food cooks so fast in the NuWave oven and so well too. This is why you’re able to enjoy not having to closely monitor your food while it’s cooking for several minutes and this is why you’re able to do other things with this time.
Is a convection oven. It uses air and circulates the heat all around while the same time creating this Vapor of steam that is constantly cooking your food from head to toe.
To counteract the Steam an prevent my kitchen in my house from smelling like that dinner all night and perhaps all morning, we would do all the cooking in the garage. Yes, that’s right we left the cooking in the garage. But if you ever seen the amount of steam that comes out when you left the dome, you would understand.
Well the smell and the steam that comes out is amazing oh, I wouldn’t want the smell to linger around in my house for hours even after dinner.
It requires a lot of space
This goes without saying that the NuWave oven is pretty large. It requires a lot of counter space if you plan to leave it in your kitchen. I, on the other hand, placed it on the table in the garage. It’s been there for about 10 years and it’s never left that exact area other than when it needs to be washed and cleaned.
Don’t forget, when you remove the Dome you’ll need extra space to place the Dome on two. The NuWave Oven that I bought came with this little mechanism that allowed you to rest your Dome onto at an angle. I’m not sure if they still sell it that way but it was a nice accessory.
I eventually ended up losing that little accessory and I had to just place the Dome down on the other end of the table. Luckily my table was much larger than the NuWave oven and it had a whole lot more space the place.
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