Nuwave Bravo XL Oven I don’t think I ever wrote an article about cooking in all the years I have been writing articles. I am not a chef, but one thing I seemed to learn in my travels was how to cook and it served me well. When I was a kid in school, I took a part time job as a short order cook in a diner and at another time in an ice cream parlor which also served food. It was sort of set up like a pre-Friendly’s. I learned even more when I had to watch food cooking at these restaurants which were being prepared all different ways. Some were to be rare, others medium and some well done, and I had to get it right. Before I go into the rest of the story, I want you to know I was not paid to advertise by anyone and what I tell you is how I feel about the products. I decided to buy an air fryer. The first one I bought was just too small to make a meal on. I put it into storage after a while and bought a bigger one. To my disappointment I had a hard time working it. I think I am of at least average intelligence but the system it used was crazy. One would think anything that had a screen and buttons would use words to describe the function. When you pressed the button, a screen came up with all symbols and if you didn’t memorize them, you had to get the manual, thumb through it to see what they meant before you could cook. I got frustrated and gave up on air fryers for a while. One day I got one for a present but my wife never used it. I gave it to my son, who after a couple of weeks told me how great it was. The air fryer was a Nuwave, one of those round ones. After a few calls from him singing the phase of his air fryer, I decided to take a leap of faith and when I checked their website, they had come out with a bigger model about the size of a large microwave oven. It was named the Nuwave Bravo XL. I tried it and couldn’t believe how fast it cooked, all the different modes it had, the different temperatures it allowed, and the more than one step type of cooking if needed. The only down side I found with it was it was hard to clean. OK, I may have had a hard time cleaning it, because reaching inside and scrubbing was difficult, but the cooking was incredible. I decided to save what I found out about cooking on it. One of the things I found was, you usually didn’t have to turn food over you were cooking. You could if you wanted, but I found most of the time it was not necessary and only did it when I was making barbecued food in it and wanted to get a good sauce soaking on both sides as the food cooked. I can tell you this, the BBQ was just as good, if not better, than BBQ made on a grill. The first time I tried this I made pork ribs and they were great. Oh, there is one other thing I failed to mention, I never got the temperature probe to work correctly. The Nuwave Bravo XL has a temperature probe which automatically is supposed to stop the cooking when a certain internal temperature is reached. It plugs into the front of the machine and has a long metallic wire allowing it to be plugged into the meat. I use a hand held temperature gauge it is only a very slight inconvenience. A comprehensive food chart accompanies the purchase and there are a lot of recipes online for the machine. I used to make a lot of food using my gas oven. It made for long cooking times and seemed to put out a lot of heat making cooking in it in the summer tough unless the air conditioner was on high. The Nuwave Bravo XL cooks much faster so you can cool off quicker and make an entire meal if someone drops in, in only a few minutes. An example is I cooked a steak which weighed about one pound and was about ½ thick in just 12 minutes and it was medium well. I love baked potatoes and cook then until very soft. 1 hour at 450 degrees. Just throw them in after washing and puncturing them and forget. This is one of the slowest things to cook. Delicious chicken cutlets breaded and oiled, thin thickness take 14 minutes at 400 degrees. Six chicken legs take 31 minutes at 450 degrees. Almost everyone likes hamburgers. Six hamburgers good size take 12-14 minutes at 450 degrees according to taste. Thin pork cutlets took me 14 minutes at 450 degrees, they were breaded and oiled. Lamb chops which were thick took me 17 minutes at 450 degrees. One could cook anything in the Nuwave, as long as it fits. I guess you noticed I only referred to more commonly made food and not roasts and such, but they also are easy to make along with chickens. There seems to be no limit to the great food you can make in this thing. There are others who love there Nuwave, both the round one and the bigger Bravo XL and they can be found giving out recipes on YouTube and many of them state they are not being paid to do this. It has become sort of a hobby. I do all the cooking now and it has made my life a lot easier. Between the Nuwave oven and the microwave for warming up food, which I could also do in the Nuwave, but there is a 5 minute warming cycle first so that is why I still use the microwave, my life has gotten easier and now it is a lot more fun to cook, and I can tell you this, when it finally doesn’t work anymore, I will buy another one. So far it has run for a couple of years and I use it almost every day. One more thing, the cooking times for food was for the way I like it, others may differ.
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