Placing anything near the elements in a toaster oven can cause a fire. While this model has settings for the various cooking modes , it is a manual oven with no presets. The timer, which can be set for up to 120 minutes, ticks as time goes by. At first, I noticed the ticking, but after using the oven regularly, it became background noise that was easy to ignore.
For more options, see our full toaster oven ratings and recommendations as well as our toaster and toaster oven buying guide. My family’s only gripe with the 2-in-1 is that when you open the oven door, the oven rack doesn’t automatically come out. On our old Toastation, the rack was attached to the door so when you opened the door, the rack came out slightly, making it easy to see food inside. Today, the sheer amount of toasters available has never been more overwhelming, and most have gone through a massive upgrade. I need one that doesn’t off-gas, doesn’t produce chemical smells, doesn’t release particulates and won’t break in a week. So far, every one of these has issues with some or all of these.
For any hamilton beach toaster oven oven, you always want to be mindful of cooking times and check on the food for the desired doneness just like you would when using a traditional oven. When we’re cooking directly on our toaster oven’s rack I find it’s easier to carefully remove the whole rack instead. Remove your toaster oven’s cooking rack or grab a baking sheet and place a cooling rack inside of it if available. But if you’re lightly oiling your potatoes for a crispy skin you will get oil in the bottom of your toaster oven.
In our tests, the first batch of hamilton beach toaster took about 2 minutes 30 seconds, the second batch took 2 minutes 4 seconds, and the third batch took 1 minute 20 seconds . These were some of the fastest toasting times of all the toaster ovens we tested. Both air fryers and toaster ovens are types of convection ovens. Convection works by a fan circulating the heated air very quickly. The hot air combined with the movement cooks food faster and increases surface evaporation allowing the surface of foods to get much crisper than in a traditional or conventional oven. Additionally, the movement of the air combined with the slotted bases usually found in air fryers and toaster ovens means that the underside of the food also gets well-cooked and crispy.
A well-performing toaster oven should be able to toast multiple slices of bread evenly. For our most recent test of more than 20 toaster ovens, we toasted more than 500 slices of bread to evaluate whether a toaster oven cooked evenly. The feature we liked the most was the oven’s roll-top opening which not only frees up counter space, but also gives the Easy Reach its name. Most toaster ovens either swing open to the side, like a microwave, or swing down, like a conventional oven. This exposes more than two-thirds of the interior oven, much like an outdoor BBQ grill.