Published May 1, 2007. From Cook's Illustrated.
Can it roast chicken, cook pizza, and bake cookies? How about toast bread?
If you're like a lot of people, you grew up using toaster ovens to make toast, melt cheese on sandwiches, or crisp up cold slices of pizza. But if you were to go shopping to replace that simple toaster oven, you'd be in for a surprise. Today, manufacturers are building toaster ovens bigger and fancier than they've ever been. Custom settings, convection capability, sleek design, digital displays, and their own cookware come along with higher prices—up to $200 for what used to be a pretty humble appliance in the $25 to $30 range.
Are these tricked-out toaster ovens really useful? Or have manufacturers gone too far and made something nobody needs? We noted first off that these bigger toaster ovens can't approach the capacity of a full-size oven. A standard 13 by 9-inch casserole dish couldn't fit inside any of the models in our lineup. But toaster ovens' smaller size means they preheat quickly, which is great if you're in a rush or don't want to heat up the kitchen. Even the slowest model in our lineup took half the time of a full-size oven and a toaster oven also uses roughly half the energy of a full-size oven.
During testing, the toaster ovens performed inconsistently. While manufacturers have given them a sleek new look, few have actually improved on the traditional problem of toaster oven cooking: The heating elements tend to be nothing more than pairs of narrow, exposed bars across the top and the bottom of the oven. You get intense heat in proximity to the bars, which cycle on and off to regulate overall temperature. (The bars contain a nickel-chromium wire coil—the same wire that heats up inside a regular toaster-covered in ceramic and metal.) Their position also explains why toasting is so inefficient in a toaster oven. Bread might be four or more inches from the elements. Ordinary toasters, however, have eight to 10 wires on each side of the toaster slot, less than an inch from the surface of the bread.
Manufacturers have made a few technical advances, most notably adding convection, which helps with heat distribution. Others simply cover the bars with pierced metal shields to help diffuse the heat or vary the number and placement of the bars. A few of the newest models sheath the bars with quartz instead of steel. Quartz has less thermal mass than metal, so the coil starts to radiate the heat out a lot quicker; quartz also cools down more quickly, which makes the ovens less prone to overheating.
Our one recommended model cooked food more evenly than the other models, offering reliable cooking, user-friendly controls, solid construction, and even decent toast. But at $200, it was expensive, we only recommend it if you want to invest in a higher-end toaster oven for small cooking projects. But you can do equally well (and save a lot of money) with an ordinary toaster and your full-size oven.
