Hisense BSA66346PDBGUK Review
An oven packed with every feature you could want.
Verdict
A highly versatile oven, the Hisense BSA66346PDBGUK has everything you could want beyond standard cooking: temperature probe, air frying, steam and a smart app. It generally cooks very well, although the grill was uneven in my tests. My biggest complaint is that the interface is fiddly to use and often a bit confusing.
Pros
- Tonnes of features for the price
- Powerful air fryer mode
- Even cooking
Cons
- Grill slightly uneven
- Fiddly interface
Key Features
- Smart featuresConnects to the ConnectLife app for remote control.
- Capacity77-litres is plenty of space for large items or big families.
Introduction
Although it can’t be considered a cheap oven, the Hisense BSA66346PDBGUK packs more at this price than any of its rivals.
Here, you have the whole gamut: temperature probe, pyrolytic cleaning, steam cooking and air frying. Oh, and it’s a smart, connected oven, controllable over Wi-Fi from the smartphone app.
It’s generally an excellent oven, although grilling wasn’t very even, and the main interface is confusing, requiring several trips to the manual.
Design and features
- Smart looking
- Steam, air fry, temperature probe and more
- Connects to smart app
Smart looking, the Hisense BSA66346PDBGUK oven has a gloss black-glass finish to it. This oven will fit into most kitchen designs, standing out in all the right ways.
Pull down the soft-close door and you get access to the sizeable 77-litre interior. That’s about as big as you’ll get from a single built-in oven, and there is plenty of room to cook for large families or bigger dishes, such as a roast turkey.
Inside there are five shelf inserts, and Hisense thoughtfully provides a shallow baking tray, deep baking tray, metal shelf and an air fry basket.
A single slide-rail is provided, which will take any of the accessories, making dishes easier to take in and out of the oven.
A touch button turns the oven on and gets it ready for cooking. I found the main interface a little confusing, and a touch fiddly to use.
When first turned on, the oven enters its Pro mode, and it acts like a normal oven. Here, the cooking options can be selected using the LCD, which shows icons. Most of them are standard modes (you can see what they do in our handy guide to oven settings). Icons are fine, but with a screen, it would have been nice to have a text description of what a mode does, to prevent having to get the manual out.
Modes include Pizza (bottom heat), Air Fry, grill with hot air, turbo bake, large grill, gentle baking, top and bottom heat, large grill with fan, large grill and bottom heat, grill with bottom heat and fan and Eco.
Once a mode had been selected, I just had to enter the optional cooking time and then the cooking temperature. Once the oven is at temperature, it beeps and won’t start the timer countdown until the door has been opened and closed, giving you a chance to add food.
It’s nice that two cooking modes can be programmed one after the other, say baking to begin with, before turning to the grill to crisp up a lasagne.
There are also Automatic Cooking Modes, which use a different set of icons. Air Fry, for example, shows a crossed-out water drop above what looks like a shallow bowl. I had to pull the manual out to work out what the options were, which also included frozen food, pizza, meat and air fry. Again, with these modes, the temperature and cooking times can be set.
Hisense has added some programs for automatically cooking dishes, including apple pie, lasagne, apple strudel and beef steak. In all, there are 22 such programmes, although they’re labelled PR01 to PR22 on the display. Buy a more expensive oven, such as the Whirlpool W11I OM1 4MS2 H, and its full-colour LCD makes it much easier to select automatic options, giving full-text descriptions of what each option does.
Some modes can have steam added. There’s a water reservoir, which can be filled to add steam to some of the cooking modes (when the steam icon lights up, you know you can use this mode). I found the pop-out water reservoir sometimes brought the surround with it, which was a bit disappointing; the surround is easy to pop back in, but at this price, it should be more secure.
Steam only has one mode, whereas the similarly-priced Hotpoint SI9 S8C1 SH IX H has multiple steam modes, depending on what you’re cooking.
After steam cooking, the next time you turn the oven on, it says “Unfil” on the screen. I had to refer to the manual to find out that it meant the water reservoir had to be emptied. Doing this wasn’t straightforward, and I had to read the manual to work out which buttons to press.
If those modes weren’t enough, there’s also a temperature probe. Plug this in, and the time mode changes to a target temperature. Just set the temperature you want, such as 74°C for a whole chicken, and the cooking mode, and the oven will turn off when the food’s perfectly cooked.
As well as manual control, there’s an app for the oven. From here, you can set the oven. It’s slightly easier to use the app, as it explains what each mode does. When the oven finishes a cycle, it will ping your phone, which is handy if you want to walk away while leaving food to cook.
To remote start the oven, it has to be put into remote control mode. That’s the same for all smart ovens, and is a safety feature to prevent accidents, should someone start the oven while they’re not at home.
It’s good to see pyrolytic cleaning available, mainly as ovens that have this tend to be more expensive. Turn this feature on, and the oven gets super-hot, burning away residue until it’s ash, ready to be swept out. No more chemicals and cleaning. It’s
Performance
- Uneven grill
- Excellent air frying
- Even temperature distribution
I put the oven through a few standard tests. First, I used the air fry mode, rather than the standard oven, to cook a batch of chips. These cooked faster and more efficiently than using the oven, resulting in power consumption of just 0.386kWh; typically an oven will use around 0.5kWh to cook this amount. The results were good, too: crunchy chips on the outside while maintaining a soft and fluffy interior.
I then tested how evenly the oven heated itself. I put in a tray of ceramic beads and set the oven to 200°C. Leaving the tray on the top shelf for 15-minutes, I measured the temperature at the front at 196.3°C, while it was warmer at the back at 214.6°C.
Looking at the thermal image, you can see a hot spot, where the fan blows warm air forward, but the edges and front are nice and uniform.
On the middle shelf, the temperature variance was much closer: 211.8°C at the back and 203°C at the front. Again, the thermal image shows a similar picture, and demonstrates that this oven will cook evenly.
I tested the probe cooking with a chicken breast, with the oven turning off once the internal temperature was 74°C. I found that the breast was juicy and tender on the inside, and hadn’t dried out.
I then moved to my grill test, placing six slices of bread on a shelf under the grill. Here, the results were a little disappointing: the grill was far hotter at the back left than anywhere else. When using the grill, I’d turn regularly to avoid burning in this section.
Finally, I tested the oven with its steam setting, cooking a baguette. Having steam makes the bread crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. You can’t get much better than this.
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Should you buy it?
You want lots of features at a reasonable price
From pyrolytic cleaning to steam and probe cooking, this oven has it all.
You want an oven that’s easier to use
Models with a full LCD screen tend to be easier to use.
Final Thoughts
The wide range of cooking options makes the Hisense BSA66346PDBGUK a highly versatile device that, except for the uneven grill, cooks very well.
I’m a fan of the temperature probe cooking, and air frying adds versatility. I’m not so keen on the interface, which had me referring back to the manual on multiple occasions.
How we test
Unlike other sites, we test every oven we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Used as our main oven for the review period
We use ceramic beads and a thermal camera to see how evenly the oven heats.
We use slices of bread to see how evenly the grill cooks.
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FAQs
You get the same kind of crispy results from the way that air circulates, and it costs less to use this mode than traditional convection cooking.
Full specs
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
