Cuisinart Classic Toasters
Within just a few minutes, your toaster oven should be hot enough to prepare a whole batch of muffins. Don’t get me wrong – the Cuisinart-60 Air Fryer/Toaster Oven is a great kitchen workhorse. It gives you lots of cooking options, a large enough cooking area, and quick cooking times. It’s certainly not as good as the big ol’ Breville Smart Oven Air — although it’s still great for a dual-function air fryer toaster oven. The Breville BTA840XL Die-Cast 4-Slice Smart Toaster was hands down the best toaster we tested, but we’re not confident it will last long enough to justify its exorbitant price. The model we’ve been long-term testing since 2018 is still working well.
Convection uses a fan and exhaust system to circulate hot air inside the toaster oven, which makes for faster, more even cooking. It’s not a necessary feature for everyone, but it’s definitely nice to have—especially if you like to bake. Because toaster ovens are generally smaller than full-size ovens or wall ovens, most require much less time to preheat. This means you don’t have to wait up to half an hour to begin cooking or baking.
These white tops get even bigger if you forget to push the bread down as far as it will go in the slot—something we found irritating and hard to remember. We liked the digital-countdown feature on the All-Clad TJ822D51 Digital 2-Slice Toaster, but the heating elements weren’t consistently illuminated, and the bottom edges of our bread didn’t get fully toasted. This model isn’t weighted as much as some of the others we tested, so if you apply too much pressure when pressing down the lever, the entire toaster tips forward. The heating elements on the Breville BTA735BSS the Toast Select Luxe weren’t consistently flush with the interior, and sections of them didn’t fully illuminate. The lift lever didn’t raise toast as high as our picks did, and the toast shade wasn’t as even from edge to edge. The top and sides of this model get very hot when it’s operating, so we wouldn’t recommend it if you have young kids at home.
However, I would not use it for reheating anything else that was not once crispy, such as soup, pasta, etc. BestReviews spends thousands of hours researching, analyzing and testing products to recommend the best picks for most consumers. BestReviews and its newspaper partners may earn a commission if you purchase a product through one of our links.
So, be careful not to let any cords rest against the oven exterior as a safety precaution. Cuisinart has long been known for its consistently high-performing kitchen products, and the Cuisinart TOB 260N1 is no exception. With various preset options, new users may be a little overwhelmed at first.
Pretty much anything you’d pan fry–from meat to veggies, can be made in the air fryer. A. Cuisinart toasters are easy to operate, no matter how basic or advanced they are. If you want to keep it simple, there are many models with simple buttons or dials.
It allows you to check the degree of doneness mid-toast and offers the option to add 30 seconds more to the toasting cycle. Also, the Breville’s steel casing has a classic look that would fit the aesthetic of almost any kitchen. That said, testing done by Ohio State revealed that even though the toaster itself is well constructed, the Breville’s heating cuisinart soup maker elements weren’t as corrosion-resistant as those of the Cuisinarts . And although the Breville has more-complex circuitry than the Cuisinarts, the quality isn’t necessarily better, so it may not last longer. If you’re worried about this multi-functional oven looking clunky in your kitchen, rest assured the stainless steel exterior is sleek and modern.
To see how each toaster handled breads of different shapes and sizes, we toasted dozens of loaves of basic white bread, bagels, frozen waffles, and English muffins. For our white-bread test, we toasted three back-to-back rounds of Wonder bread slices to see how consistent the toast was from model to model and batch to batch. These multiple batches showed us how well each toaster could regulate its temperature after heating up. You don’t need a big, hefty kitchen appliance, like a wall oven, to do the heavy lifting in the kitchen.
The medium setting on both Cuisinarts also popped out a fully done piece of toast after 1 minute 20 seconds—almost half the time it took our previous top pick, the Oster Jelly Bean . In each round, we timed each toaster to see which could brown bread the fastest. We also bit into the toast to evaluate its texture and taste, looking for slices that had a lightly charred and crispy exterior and a warm interior that didn’t feel too dried out or stiff. Though no model we tested took eons to brown bread, the best ones produced golden toast more than twice as fast as the worst performers. There are also concerns that toaster ovens coated with non-stick material, called polytetrafluoroethylene , also known as Teflon, are harmful to our health and linked to bird deaths. For easy and effective cleaning, just wipe down the interior with a wet cloth.