Whether it’s finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we’ll help you get it right (the first time). Watch as it cooks your food through the well-lit, easy-view window for an immersive cooking experience. We consider legibility of markings and ease of setting desired time and temperature.
I also tested two pieces of bread on the lowest doneness setting (light) and the highest (dark), to see how well these presets were calibrated. After each of the three toast tests, I photographed the results and made sure to let the toaster oven cool to room temperature before testing again. On top of that, the oven is sturdy, attractive and has an easily removable crumb tray, and it’s packed with extra cooking settings and modes that you might actually find useful, including convection cooking. It also preheats extremely fast, holds the heat well and has intuitive controls. Because air fryers are useful for cooking a variety of foods—such as chicken, steak, and even doughnuts—many of us are under the impression there isn’t anything you can’t cook in them. There’s no small appliance that’s more popular than the air fryer right now.
Toasters are good for more than just breakfast, however — these compact ovens can toast, bake, and broil and reheat with the best of them. After testing several models for speed and evenness, Panasonic’s speedy FlashXpress turned in the best overall stats to earn its spot as the best toaster in hamilton beach toaster oven 2023. The Ultrean 4.2 Quart Air Fryer is one of the less expensive models we tested, and it happened to provide one of the least pleasant user experiences. The buttons were noisy and hard to press, and the basket was difficult to shove in without pushing the entire air fryer back on the counter.
In addition to the matte black design with rose-gold colored knobs, it also comes in white and stainless steel. Aesthetics aside, this air fryer toaster oven performed well in our tests. Air fried wings took 20 minutes to crisp evenly, released from the air fryer basket easily and stayed juicy. We were pleased that there wasn’t any smoking during air frying and that the oven was easy to use overall. Air fryer toaster ovens offer all the versatility of a toaster oven or countertop oven with the additional benefit of air frying.
So yeah, it’s really not good for us to eat fried foods, and we hardly ever do. Our assessment of cleaning the air fryer includes both baskets, the interior of the machine and exterior surfaces. Sharon Franke is a journalist who specializes in testing and writing about kitchen equipment. A thirty-year veteran of the Good Housekeeping Institute, Sharon also worked as a professional chef in New York City restaurants for seven years. In her free time, she is an avid home cook who is in the process of mastering the art of baking sour dough bread. 7-9 minutes was the perfect time for me to give them a soft texture with a crunch.
These are even more inexpensive than convection toaster ovens and more suitable for small spaces. We recommend the Panasonic FlashXpress (a top pick in our guide to toaster ovens). It won’t blast food with hot air, but it can still bake relatively quickly and provide crispy results due to its small oven cavity, which is similar in size to a pod-shaped air fryer. On the flip side, one of the biggest pitfalls of pod-shaped air fryers is that their compact size really limits not only the amount of food you can cook at once but also the kind of food you can cook. Air fryers can’t fit larger items like casseroles, whole pizzas, or whole chickens.
The Comfee and Oster cords were both only 2 feet long while the rest were 3 feet or longer. It certainly isn’t the worst failing for a toaster but, depending on your kitchen layout, can be an annoyance. Here’s the big Oster, large enough to roast a small chicken, next to the itty-bitty Balmuda.
Its large, square-shaped 5-quart basket fits more food than the Philips Premium Airfryer HD9741/56, but it doesn’t cook as quickly or evenly. The Pro LE’s many preprogrammed settings also weren’t as accurate as those of the Premium Airfryer—we preferred using the manual controls for selecting the time and temperature. But considering its relatively low price, and the fact that most air fryers of this style don’t cook very evenly, we think the results were good enough.