Agreed.

The one thing to check is the top temperature. It may not be high enough for pizza. Okay for browning up a pre-cooked pizza (frozen or not), but perhaps not for getting a nice oven pop (spring) of a rise of the crust. Everything else should be fine. Some things, like the garlic bread, might do better on oven only settings, rather than speed, but will come out fine.

Any time you include microwave cooking, you do have potential for loss of quality. A good quality speed oven should be able to produce good quality food, but there's often a learning curve for the time and settings, and when it goes wrong, quality can suffer where appearance is fine. That's why a lot of people like programmed settings on speed ovens. If there are enough of the right kind of programs, so that they're really in line with what you want to cook, they allow you to be successful right away. After awhile, if you pay attention, you'll get a feel for what's working well and learn to adapt to things that aren't on the programs.

I personally like the Miele Speed oven. Unlike the GE, it is a regular oven that has a very good microwave. It can also be put undercounter, unlike the the 240v advantium. We had one in our last kitchen and used it as our primary oven as it preheated so quickly and was able to handle the majority of the foods we were baking. There is also a Bosche out there which I have not really looked into. We definitely loved having a Speed oven so we could have a second oven and not have to have two appliances.

I second everything Austin said. I love our Miele speed oven. We use it daily for all sorts of things, and the microwave function works fantastically also. We've roasted all kinds of veggies, cooked frozen though not homemade pizza. I've baked cookies, spanakopita, chicken fingers, potstickers, veggie pot pies, and probably other stuff too. All come out great. I have a 36" range so I use that oven for homemade pizza. We've only used the microwave and the convection bake and convection broil modes. This oven is totally worth it for those three modes alone.

How hard is it to clean the Miele speed oven? An appliance showroom that I go to has one in their kitchen that they use and its pretty nasty inside. That turned me off.

I would think it should be similar to Miele combi steam oven. They have the same PerfectClean finish as well as the broiler element. The more difficult area is behind the broiler. For the rest, it is not difficult to keep clean. It is just a matter of wiping off splatter after every use that involves greasy splatty dishes.

Following oven interior images are from Miele combi steam oven at Miele centre in Sydney. It is a demo oven used in cooking class, and gets used daily. Apart from some amount of grease stain behind the broiler, the rest of the oven is pretty clean.

What about the Bosch??? Any comments? We were looking at it but are unsure.

Check out some of the other threads here on the Bosch. Long story short the only way you can use the speed mode is via 9 preprogrammed food settings, so if you want to speedcook something else besides Bosch's 9 food choices... good luck. Advantium and Miele Masterchef have tons more selections, and they also can be used in manual mode where you can create your own programs.

What Austin and malabacat said. I love our Miele speed oven. We have the non-automatic programming one. I think, probably, the addition of the programs is more than a slight upgrade but counts perhaps for a qualitatively different machine. I didn't really know that when I bought the low-end -- it was more than we could afford as-is. But I love that we have it. The under-counter capability was the deal-maker for us and it works as promised. There's a little bit of hot-air venting underneath the top of the door, but it's not scalding, not dangerous for small passersby. You need a dedicated 220V line.

The learning curve on the non-auto version is long but I've got a numch figured out now. dh thinks chicken cooked in it is better than either the grill or the gas stove. It is faster than other options, though not tons faster. I think it takes about 35 minutes for a 3+ bird or so, maybe 40 minutes since I always undercook it! But that's fast enough that by the time the table is set and stuff gets taken care of on arriving home, you can basically cook dinner from scratch without waiting unduly. It's fast-enough. Faster, basically, than me/life!

It is a bit of a pain to clean -- that is, it's not *hard* to clean but I'm not sure it gets all that clean. There are little holes in the interior - probably that's a MW-necessity? And it's just sort of stained -- doesn't bother me, it's obviously not a health hazard and I don't hold tea parties in there. There's a bolt that holds the heating element on top in place that you can let down to get underneath it to clean -- that's good. One problem cleaning-wise is that it sits inside a 24" cabinet IIRC, and crumbs can drop between the door and into the cabinet but it's very difficult to reach those without removing the whole machine, which is *heavy*. So .... that's my biggest cleanliness complaint.

If you do all of a meal's cooking in the one machine, you might want to use the MW after using the oven, which is problematic because the tray is hot. A silicon mat can help with that. With a little effort I was able to find cookie trays that exactly fit the interior - that's nice.

Biggest and best advice I received was to build into your plans a very shallow drawer right underneath or to the side to receive the tray or rack you're not using. No one wants to schlep across the kitchen looking for those things and it's true, when they're all immediately there, it's an enormous help. I also built a second, slightly larger drawer for MW-safe glass containers underneath -- a big planning-plus, IMO.

This machine is really impressive, IMO. Be careful of its glass tray -- they are very expensive to replace.