Introduction
Cooking is often about having the flexibility to do the jobs you want when you want, which the Samsung Bespoke Series 5 NV7B5750TAK/U4 Oven with Dual Cook Flex delivers in spades. With Dual Cook Flex, this oven can be used as one large or two small sections, plus there’s a wide range of additional cooking options including air sous vide, steam, and air fry.
Design and features
SmartThings-enabledSplits into two cooking zonesWide range of programmes
Open the main door on the Samsung NV7B5750TAK/U4 and it looks and feels like pretty much any other integrated oven. The 76-litre cavity provides enough space to cook large dinners for lots of people. The space inside is flexible, with one metal oven shelf and a baking tray, both of which can fit into any of the four fixed positions or onto the pull-out slider. So far, so normal. But as this is a Dual Cook Flex oven, there’s more to it. Slide in the divider and the oven is split into two smaller spaces. The bottom oven is only accessible by opening the full door, while the top oven can be accessed via the top of the door. This is exceptionally clever for two reasons. First, it means you can cook food at different temperatures at the same time. Secondly, you can use just half of the oven space and save money by not heating up the entire thing. The latter option is great for smaller dishes when you don’t really need to use the full power of the oven. With the divider in place, the top and bottom ovens each have their own settings. The Top oven has convection (40°C to 250°C), grill, top heat, air fry (a basket is provided), and auto cook programmes, with the latter offering a range of pre-set options for foods such as baking potatoes and frozen oven chips. The bottom oven has convection, bottom heat, and auto programmes. Here, the auto options are geared toward items that do better with bottom heat, such as pizzas and pies. Take the divider out and you get all the same modes (bar air fry) and some extras: conventional cooking (top and bottom heat), pro-roasting, plus a couple of specials. Natural Steam uses a steam tray, which you fill with water. Steam is a great way of making crispy and tender food – I use it for cooking baguettes. Having a dedicated steam tray is a good option instead of having to pour water into a baking tray. But a dedicated water compartment and control over how much steam is produced, such as on the Hotpoint SI9 S8C1 SH IX H, would have been even better. There’s also Air Sous Vide, where the oven controls its temperature to cook food thoroughly. Traditionally, sous vide involves vacuum-sealing food into bags and submerging these in water to cook to a specific temperature. But the NV7B5750TAK/U4 aims to do the same thing with air alone. A different range of automatic cooking options, including dough proofing and roasting, allows you to set the weight of the food you want to cook and let the oven take care of the rest. That’s mostly a good idea, but the range of options isn’t always there. For chicken, for example, the heaviest weight I could enter was 1.4kg, while a free-range organic chicken from any decent butcher is easily 2kg or more. As always with automatic cooking programmes, I found them useful as an initial guide, opting for manual settings once I was used to the appliance. The Samsung NV7B5750TAK/U4 is a smart oven, able to connect to the SmartThings platform. From the app, I could select any cooking mode, temperature, and cooking time and send them to the oven. There’s also a cooking add-on that runs through guided modes, choosing the right settings for you to cook a specific recipe. It’s a neat way of getting to know the oven. Generally, I found it easier to set the cooking mode on the oven, although the app is still useful for guidance on the best oven settings for different recipes. As with a lot of Samsung appliances, this one plays ditties when it turns on and when it finishes a programme. They’re a touch on the annoying side, although they don’t play for long. Lights on the top and sides of the oven ensure that the main cavity is well illuminated, both when the oven is used as a whole and when it’s split in two.
Performance
Air fryer function doesn’t provide the crispiest resultsImpressive sous vide mode
I started my tests by using the Air Fryer mode to cook some chips. I found that I needed a little more time than I normally would do when using a standalone air fryer. The chips were cooked evenly, although they lacked the full crunchiness that a regular air fryer would deliver. The same was true for a hash brown – it was properly cooked, but the outside wasn’t quite as crispy as when I’ve cooked these in an air fryer. Overall, however, the results here were better than in a traditional oven. I then turned to the Air Sous Vide mode, which is designed to maintain a set temperature for a long period for perfectly cooked meats and fish. Traditionally, sous vide is done with food sealed in bags and dropped into heated water, such as with the Thermomix TM6. Here, Samsung can do all that with air. I filled a sous vide bag (it has a double-zip lock) with ceramic beads and left it in the oven for an hour. After removing the bag, I found that the contents were a consistent 62.1°C. That’s impressive, as perfectly cooked food is delivered at lower temperatures than with most ovens. Next, I measured the temperature variance. I set the oven to 200°C and added a tray of ceramic beads to the top shelf. After leaving the beads for 20mins, the temperature was 198.7°C at the back and 189.3°C at the front. As you can see on the thermal image below, the front of the oven is cooler than the back, where the heating element and fan are. Temperature variance throughout the oven is good. Moving the tray to the bottom shelf, I measured temperatures of 201.1°C (back) and 189.4°C (front), which is similar to the temperatures at the top of the oven. Depending on what you’re cooking, turning items halfway through cooking can help with evenness. Next, I made a baguette using the gentle steam option and the oven set to 250°C. After 20mins, I was pleased to see that the baguette took on a darker brown colour, but it didn’t burn, coming out with a crispy finish. Next, I measured the evenness of the grill by loading the top shelf with slices of white bread. As you can see from the image below, all slices are well toasted. Although the front left and right slices are a touch less done around the edges, it’s still an excellent result.
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Sustainability
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