Smeg Built-In 60cm SpeedwaveXL Galileo Oven SO6102M2B3 Review

Verdict

Combining a full-size oven with a microwave, the Smeg Built-In 60cm SpeedwaveXL Galileo Oven SO6102M2B3 offers flexible cooking like no other oven, whether that’s microwaving large items or speeding up a cook using traditional cooking and the microwave. While the oven cooks brilliantly and is efficient, the user interface is tricky to use, and the manual is very basic. There are also frustrating quirks, such as the inability to add extra cooking time when a cooking session ends.

Introduction

The Smeg Built-In 60cm SpeedwaveXL Galileo Oven SO6102M2B3 isn’t the first combination microwave oven I’ve reviewed, but it is the first one I’ve tested that’s a full-size 60cm model. That’s a brilliant combination for cooking larger items, but this oven could also be a space saver in a small kitchen, where you don’t have room for separates.

I found that it cooks well and is power efficient, but the user interface is hard to understand and the basic manual doesn’t help things.

Design and Features

• Combination microwave and oven
• Door is hard to see through
• Large space inside

The Smeg Built-In 60cm SpeedwaveXL Galileo Oven SO6102M2B3 fits into a standard 60cm oven slot, whether that’s under a hob or built into a wall cabinet. In that regard, it’s a standard oven.

As this is Smeg, looks are high up the list, and it’s a sleek, modern-looking oven. I’m a particular fan of the stripes that run across the front, down over the glass window below.

The soft-close door swings open to reveal the 68-litre cavity inside. That’s a touch smaller than the biggest ovens that I’ve seen, such as the Neff N90 B69VY7MY0; however, there’s enough space inside to cook for a typical family.

Smeg provides a few basics in the box. There’s a single wire shelf, a deep baking tray, a microwaveable glass tray and a grill stand that can go in the glass tray. There’s also a telescopic shelf attachment, which you can put anywhere in the oven.

These are a great accessory on any oven, as they make it easy to add and remove bulkier items. I would have liked at least one more wire shelf in the box, and it feels a bit stingy to provide only one.

There’s also some confusion about how the glass dish should be used. The basic manual that comes with the oven says to use “the glass dish by placing it on the grid”, but fails to mention what the “grid” is. Grab the manual from online, and it says something different about the glass dish: “To be placed on top of the lowered pan stand, it is particularly suitable for microwave cooking.”

After checking with Smeg, I was told that this is a translation issue that will be fixed with future manuals. What you need to know is that the glass dish should be placed on a wire shelf located on the lowest rung.

Fiddly and confusing do seem to be the order of the day, as the scant manual and the basic interface don’t always make it obvious what a setting does. For example, there’s a touch button on the front of the LCD that opens up the special options.

Some of these, such as a snowflake for the defrost option, make immediate sense, but seeing ‘669’ on screen didn’t make a lot of sense. Checking the manual it turns out that this mode is for the optional BBQ griddle. Likewise, St0n is for the optional pizza stone, and Fry for the optional airfryer basket .

There’s also a mode that has a ‘V’ displayed on the screen, although I couldn’t see this explained in the cooking instructions in the paper manual or the online one. Further down under ‘cleaning and maintenance’ I found that this was the Vapor Clean mode. Once the shelf brackets have been removed, and the oven sprayed with a mixture of water and washing up liquid, this 18-minute cycle provides assisted cleaning.

It’s a useful, low-power cleaning tool, but it won’t shift hard burnt-on residue in the same way that a pyrolytic mode will do.

Other modes include melt, soften, and bread rising, but there’s no plate warming or keep warm feature.

I think that if you’re going to have an LCD, then it should be clearer to understand and preferably have text information. The Neff N90 oven is a brilliant example of how an LCD can work.

The standard modes are easier to understand, with a choice of microwave, combination (microwave and oven or grill), top and bottom heat (with or without fan), fan oven, grill and bottom heat only.

All of the modes give you an option of cooking time, target temperature and/or microwave power (100W, 200W, 300W, 400W, 600W  or Hi, which is 900W). To that end, the Smeg Built-In 60cm SpeedwaveXL Galileo Oven SO6102M2B3 is pretty easy to use, but there are still some quirks.

When a mode finishes, the oven just says End on the screen, and I had to press the power button to finish the job. It’s a little frustrating if you need a bit more cooking time. For example, when defrosting bread, I found that my initial time wasn’t enough, but I couldn’t just add a bit more time. Instead, I had to stop the process, choose defrost again, and programme in a new timer.

I’d also like to see the oven have a few more guided modes. For example, when defrosting, a lot of microwaves let you choose the type of frozen food, enter its weight and then take care of the job automatically. Here, it’s all manual input, which is fine in the long run, but guided programmes are often useful to get started with.

As this is a microwave oven, the glass in the door has a wire mesh running through it, which obscures the view into the oven. This is typical of microwave ovens, but here it does make it hard to see how food is cooking, particularly items being grilled.

Performance

• Excellent cooking results
• Even heating
• Powerful microwave

While the interface may be frustrating, the Smeg Built-In 60cm SpeedwaveXL Galileo Oven SO6102M2B3’s saving grace is its brilliant microwave oven. I started by defrosting slices of bread using the defrost option.

From the thermal camera image below, you can see that the final bread was cold throughout, but the defrosting was even. After a couple of minutes out in the open, the bread was ready to be turned into sandwiches.

Likewise, reheating rice in a bowl, I found that the microwave did this evenly on its maximum power setting.

For combination cooking, I used the convection oven and 300W microwave to cook a baked potato from scratch in just 20m. I had a soft, fluffy interior and a nice crispy skin. That’s the kind of power that combination cooking gives you: better results, faster.

I then turned on the grill, and laid out six slices of bread across the oven shelf. As you can see, the bread is evenly toasted from edge to edge, which is a brilliant result.

I then added ceramic baking beads to trays and set the oven to 200°C. After leaving the trays on the top and middle shelves, and left them from 20 minutes.

On the top shelf, the front of the tray was 205°C, and the back a toasty 221°C. That’s relatively even as far as ovens go, with the heat towards the back, as the thermal image showed (the white parts are the hottest).

On the middle shelf, the back was 198.4°C and the front 189°C, which is just a little off the set temperature. Again, you can see that heat is quite evenly distributed, although warmer at the back where the heating element and fan are.

Cooking chips at 210°C, I found that they cooked evenly across the tray, with only the smaller ones looking over done. The resulting chips were crispy on the outside and soft on the inside as they should be.

Excluding heat-up, the Smeg Built-In 60cm SpeedwaveXL Galileo Oven SO6102M2B3 consumed 0.4kWh of power for this test, which is excellent. Typically, ovens use 0.5kWh or more.

Finally, I cooked a baguette, which was evenly cooked and crispy on the outside, although not as well done as in a steam oven.

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