Whether you’re making some yummy banana cake or reheating some mini pizzas, a toaster oven is super essential and a must-have in your kitchen. A toaster oven lets your bake chicken, broil vegetables, and keep food warm for serving. Look through a variety of toaster ovens with features like time and temperature controls to make cooking fast and easy.
The children are able to use it easily, and there is no immediate danger to them when they use it, just as long as an adult is in the house. It is so simple to fix snacks and quick lunches and dinners with this toaster oven! We make little miniature pizzas on English muffins, and sandwiches are so delicious after you pop them in the toaster oven for a few minutes. Chicken nuggets are also easy to heat up, and clean-up is a snap with this toaster oven. All you have to do is pull out the heating tray, stick it in the dishwasher, and wah-la! Even Heating
Food is always thoroughly heated when using this toaster oven.
The oven is extremely quiet as it operates with a dBA reading of 50.4; we virtually couldn’t hear it when it was running. Hamilton Beach’s new version of the Toastation is the 2-in-1 Countertop Oven and Toaster. It has the same great dual functionality as my old Toastation, but it’s even better. The oven can fit a 9-inch pizza — the old Toastation couldn’t — yet the overall size of the entire unit is not that much bigger. The 2-in-1 is not a cute shade of red like the Toastation, but its sleek chrome finish still looks stylish on my countertop.
Once your toaster is up and running, we recommend that you empty the crumb tray often. To keep grease from dripping on the lower heating element, use foil and a pan underneath whatever you’re cooking. We recognize that for some, a level of automation could prove helpful, so we’ll continue to test smart ovens. But we haven’t yet tested one where the features feel worth the investment for most people.
When she runs out of room, she told us, she turns to the toaster oven to make gratins, lasagna, and sandwiches. The oven took 9 minutes to bake a 9-inch thick-crust meat pizza which was slightly faster than the label’s recommended 10 minutes. However, compared to our tested hamilton beach toaster ovens, it could only be a 6/10. At our optimal toasting setting, the Hamilton Beach produced 4 pieces with a great, slightly golden-brown color. Though the oven doesn’t have a convection fan, the color distribution was about 80% even so we gave the toast an 8/10.
Corner to corner, no other oven was as consistent (aside from the exorbitantly priced Wolf Gourmet Countertop Oven). Similarly priced large toaster ovens (like ones from Breville and KitchenAid) concentrated heat in the center of the oven and had more significant fall-off of heat toward the edges. The FlashXpress made crispy-yet-melty Bagel Bites that were more consistently browned from one edge of the pan to the other.
It offers just three temperature settings—350 °F, 400 °F, and 450 °F—plus four presets, and it can only fit two pieces of bread. The Balmuda has other design flaws (a flap on the door) and twee impracticalities (the easy-to-lose steam cup), and ultimately, we found it to be just a snazzy-looking prototype at best. The FlashXpress’s one annoying quirk is that you can’t add time or change the temperature midway through a preset cooking cycle (although you can change the toast shade settings). This means you have to turn the Panasonic off and back on again to adjust it.
If you’ve never used a toaster oven, the first thing you need to know is that it’s not a toaster. Mind you, you can make toast with it, but that’s hardly its only use or even the primary one. Depending on the household, it can fill a surprisingly wide gap between the microwave and a traditional oven. Need your snacks warmed up quickly, but hate that microwave sogginess? Need your potatoes, pies or side dishes baked while your main course is taking up the oven?
Additionally, as a Japanese appliance, the Panasonic FlashXpress is designed around degrees Celsius for temperature input. There’s a converted-to-Fahrenheit selector on the temperature indicator, but the markings are oddly spaced. You can get either 425 °F or 390 °F, but nothing in between (we chose 390 °F). But this idiosyncrasy didn’t negatively impact any of the items we cooked—most toaster ovens heat at least 10 to 15 degrees over or under the set temperature anyway.
The timer on our upgrade pick, the Breville Pro, also begins counting down once the oven is preheated. However, it will pause the timer when you open the oven door, whereas the Cuisinart doesn’t. However, after the chicken test, there hamilton beach were burnt bits stuck to the upper heating element’s guard and grease on the cooking chamber’s ceiling. There was ample space between the ceiling and the upper heating element, so we proceed to try every cleaning method possible.