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. Find a collection of convection toaster ovens and countertop ovens made from sturdy stainless steel that will also look attractive on your kitchen counter. Look through a range of air fry ovens that packs a lot of features and cooking capacity in a small countertop footprint.
We usually chose that option and checked the doneness of the food as it cooked, sometimes setting another timer to warn us when to peek at the food. The top dial, which controls the temperature, has temperatures marked, along with settings for warm, bake, toast, broil, and air fry. This toaster has two knobs that control it, with one to set the temperature and the other to set the time. The print surrounding the two knobs is black on the silver surface of the toaster. While that should have offered enough contrast to read, sometimes we had to get close or approach at a different angle to see the settings clearly on the reflective surface.
Some toaster ovens, like our budget pick, are equipped with only two heating elements. But fewer heating elements aren’t necessarily an indication of poor toasting performance. If the oven cavity is small, two elements are enough to regulate heat. That said, avoid larger toaster ovens with only a couple of elements because they won’t be able to distribute heat evenly. The more heating elements a toaster oven has, the bigger and more expensive it will be. The new and improved Cosori 5.8-Quart Air Fryer now has a smart app and the original bells and whistles.
A little lacking in the Brussels and garlic arena, this air fryer won’t do you wrong if you’re not too worried about caramelizing vegetables. In terms of pure speed, the infrared Panasonic was the fastest, living up to its FlashXpress nickname. The Balmuda also toasted four slices in under three minutes, while the Breville Mini Smart oven did it in three. The slowest was the clunky Oster, which took well over six minutes to hit medium, followed by the GE, which took nearly five minutes and was still underdone.
We like the Breville Air Fryer Pro’s sleek design and easy-to-navigate interface. The Breville also has a Phase Cook feature (similar to the Cuisinart’s Dual Cook Mode), which allows you to program two back-to-back cooking functions. Like the Cuisinart, black decker toasters the Breville’s rack glides out when you open the door so you don’t have to stick your hands deep into the oven cavity to retrieve your food. It comes with two oven racks so you can cook more food at once—an addition we appreciate with the Cuisinart too.
You will want to be careful to keep anything from touching it while it cooks. We measured the sides and top of the unit reaching up to 200 degrees while the backside got to 117 degrees. While this isn’t the hottest device in our comparison, it can still leave a burn. The handle was slightly warmer than room temperature and we found it was best to grasp it in the middle as the sides got warmer. The Black+Decker Crisp N’ Bake Air Fry 4-Slice Toaster Oven did the one thing that many other toasters and toaster ovens can’t do—it toasted evenly. The bottom dial has icons for several toast levels as well as time up to 30 minutes with a single “ding!
Not surprising, considering both ovens both ran cool in the temperature consistency and accuracy test. The light setting delivered barely-there toasting while the dark setting black decker toaster oven produced proper dark pieces of toast without burning them. The Breville and Balmuda also nailed the light and dark toast cycles when I put them through their paces.
Smart ovens often include built-in cameras, probe thermometers and complex, integrated cooking programs you can control from your smart device. The slightly more expensive Breville does sport a few functions that the Panasonic doesn’t, the most important being broil and convection modes. Breville’s Mini Smart oven has three levels at which you can slide a tray in, and the black decker air fryer dials and settings allow for more precision than most ovens. A thoughtful “a bit more” button gives your food another minute of cooking time if it’s needed without having to reset the program. It can fit pans of up to 9 x 13 inches, allowing you to carry food from the oven to the table with ease. You can use it to make pizza, French fries, prepare frozen snacks, and more.