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That’s because a toaster oven can fit more food at once, and in our experience it cooks more evenly. Its convection fan has two speeds, like the Cuisinart’s, but the high speed is slightly more powerful and can crisp up food faster. The Breville Pro is also a bit roomier—it can fit a 6-quart Lodge hamilton beach mixer Dutch oven without a lid, or a 5.5-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven with a lid (the same Le Creuset can only fit in the Cuisinart without a lid). Just avoid using the lid if it has a non-metal knob that could be damaged by close contact with the heating elements (use foil to cover the pot instead).
We found that the displays on the pricier Cuisinart and Breville toaster ovens were easier to read. In every round of testing we conducted for this guide, we started by filling each toaster with as many slices of basic white bread as we could, then set each machine to toast at medium shade. The results gave us a heat map of each oven, showing us how evenly each model toasted and whether there were any hot spots. How well the toasters or toaster ovens produced a range of light to dark toast.
The large Cuisinart Chef’s Convection Toaster Oven (TOB-260N1) has nearly all of the capabilities of a full-size oven. It delivers even heat to up to nine slices of bread and can easily handle a 13-inch frozen pizza or a whole roast hamilton beach toaster oven chicken (whereas our other pick, the Panasonic FlashXpress, can fit only a handful of frozen snacks). The Cuisinart’s three-year warranty is outstanding, as are its impressive accessories, which include a ceramic pizza stone.
The Balmuda’s controls and capacity are also limited compared to our top picks. 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 KitchenAid KCO211BM Digital Countertop Toaster Oven didn’t toast as evenly as our picks, and several slices of bread were burned in patches on the bottom. The Cuisinart TOB-40 Custom Classic Toaster Oven Broiler is easy to use, but on its medium setting, bread became too dark.
Balmuda’s The Toaster is a $300 appliance that’s different from most other toaster ovens because it steams bread while it toasts. In theory, it’s supposed to help keep the “inner moisture and flavor from escaping,” but we’re not convinced it makes a difference. In fact, we weighed white sandwich bread and rustic sourdough bread before and after toasting to see how much moisture the bread retained. On average, plain white sandwich bread actually retained less moisture when toasted in the Balmuda than when toasted in our top pick, the Cuisinart.