For busy home cooks, speed is the name of the game. Until now, air fryers have been the fastest, most reliable alternative to traditional ovens, which take longer to cook and require additional time to preheat. Air fryers cook food roughly 25% faster than wall ovens, but a new fast-cooking technology has stepped into the ring. I saw it on display last week at KBIS 2026, the sprawling home and kitchen showcase in Orlando.
New forms of cooking heat don't come around often -- which made Sharp's KBIS 2026 debut all the more compelling. The Sharp Celerity High-Speed Oven packs three cooking technologies into a coordinated blast, roasting chicken and baking cookies "three times faster than a conventional oven."
Pressing the speed cook button triggers the oven's golden heater for cooking that's three times faster than normal convection. David Watsky/CNET
The quick-cook function -- aka the golden heater -- uses traditional true convection combined with microwave heat to penetrate food quickly and deeply, along with infrared to sizzle and crisp the outside.
The Celerity oven is smaller than most and closer to the size of a microwave. Sharp
The use of microwave heat accounts for the expedited cooking time, while more traditional convection is meant to prevent food from drying out. Plus, we're told the oven requires almost no preheat time when the golden heater mode is implemented.
Sharp was baking cookies in the Celerity at KBIS 2026. David Watsky/CNET
In a live demo, the Sharp team members baked cookies that emerged from the oven gooey and golden in 9 minutes. A traditional convection oven would take at least 15 minutes to do the same job. We tasted them, of course, and they were as good as grandma's -- gently crispy on the outside and perfectly soft and melty inside.
This beauty took just 9 minutes to make using Sharp's new golden heater technology. David Watsky/CNET
We're told a 5-pound chicken can be roasted in 30 minutes, even faster than in an air fryer.
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