Fits a 9-inch pizza or 4 slices of toast for dinner or breakfast. Features a 30-minute timer with auto shutoff and toast, bake, and broil settings. The roll-top feature allows the user to access items by reaching down to them, making it much easier to adjust or remove food without bumping into the oven or burning your hands. Many toaster ovens have very little space between the racks and the interior sides of the oven, making it challenging to adjust or remove food. We also liked the fact that the Easy Reach’s door is completely clear, which allowed us to monitor all of our food in one glance.
The June Oven is a smart countertop model with an internal camera, a built-in probe thermometer (which estimates when your food will be cooked through), and several pre-programmed cooking functions. The HD camera can recognize certain ingredients, automatically prompting the interface to recommend corresponding cooking programs. Plus, a Wi-Fi connection allows you to use an app to monitor your food with the camera and control the oven from anywhere in your home—or even miles away. Despite all these features, we were disappointed with the June’s performance, especially given its high price. We wish it had additional cooking programs and that the recipes were more enticing and better written.
The tray in the bottom of a Hamilton Beach toaster oven collects crumbs and other food debris to help prevent mess. You should empty this once every week or two depending on how frequently you use the appliance. It might seem like a hard task to find your perfect Hamilton Beach toaster oven, but we’ve done our research.
When the oven is operating, the glass door becomes excessively hot, reaching temperatures as high as 339.2°F. The Hamilton Beach is the only toaster oven we tested with a door handle that becomes very hot to the touch at a temperature of 146.8 °F. The oven is extremely quiet as it operates with a dBA reading of 50.4; we virtually couldn’t hamilton beach toaster hear it when it was running. Toaster ovens by Hamilton Beach only take up a small amount of counter space and have a variety of uses. This countertop oven is available in several different variations. For example, some of these ovens have doors that roll back and open upward instead of downward, making it easier to take food in and out.
It can also fit a 12-cup muffin tin (ours measured 14 by 10.75 inches) or a 9-by-13-inch baking pan (without handles). The Cuisinart has four slots for the racks, with metal hooks that pull out the middle rack when the door is opened. It was one of the fastest models to preheat to 350 °F, taking just over three minutes. Some brands will advertise the material of their toaster oven’s heating elements, and generally, ovens using quartz or ceramic will cost more than those using Calrod. But in all our research and testing, we didn’t see consistent correlations between element type and either price or performance.
However, when you open the oven door, you’ll find the rack position numbers printed on the side of the oven. But you’ll still have to consult the user manual to know where the racks should be placed for each cooking function, which is a little inconvenient. We also used an AI-powered analysis tool to scan 6,500-plus customer reviews across nine toaster ovens to identify what made some models better or worse than others. A large toaster oven that also works as an easy-to-clean rotisserie oven; earns our expert’s approval.
It’s nice to be able to adjust the rack position in your toaster oven to accommodate cookware of different sizes and make adjustments depending on what you’re cooking. The rack should be in the center when toasting, for instance, because heat comes from the top and bottom, but when broiling, you want to position the rack closer to the top heating element. When baking, you might need to set the rack lower to fit tall foods or deeper dishes. Capacious size can toast 6 slices of bread, a 12-inch pizza, or a whole chicken.
I got a reasonably even toast, although I had to watch the browning since I wasn’t sure how long it would take. If you need a slightly smaller machine, we think you’ll be happier with the Cuisinart—it performed just as well and it’s also more affordable. But if you have the space and still want a dedicated air fryer setting (plus some additional settings), we’d recommend getting our upgrade pick, the Breville Pro. One disappointing thing about the Breville, especially at this price, is that it comes with a two-year warranty, whereas the Cuisinart has a three-year warranty. To learn even more about the Breville Air Fryer Pro, see our guide to the best air fryer toaster ovens. Beyond performance, there are other features that set the Panasonic FlashXpress apart from the competition.
If your kitchen is so active that the oven is often full, you can use the toaster oven as Martha Rose Shulman—chef and author of The Simple Art of Vegetarian Cooking—does. When she runs out of room, she told us, she turns to the toaster oven to make gratins, lasagna, and sandwiches. The majority of Hamilton Beach toaster ovens have simple dial controls, but some high-end models have touchpad controls with a digital display. Although dials might seem a little outdated, they’re extremely simple to use and little can go wrong with them. Of course, touchpad controls have their benefits too, such as giving you more precise temperature control and being quick to use once you get the hang of them.
Unlike our other picks, Panasonic sells replacement parts for many of the oven’s components (including the heating elements, power button, and door handle). 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. A toaster oven is a multipurpose appliance that lets you toast bread and bake or reheat food. It’s also great for use in a small rental with a tiny kitchen and an oven that doesn’t work well (or is missing altogether).