I’m attending a “Kitchen Shower”, and a friend suggested a toaster oven as a gift. The title pretty much says it all - if you have a fully functional oven, toaster and microwave, is there any advantage to having a toaster oven? The only advantage I can think of is, being somewhat disabled, it may be easier to remove things from the TO than a regular oven, but you’d have to be cooking a small dish, wouldn’t you? What can you make in a toaster oven that would make it a desirable addition to a kitchen?
I bought a toaster oven a few years ago and I use it a lot more than I thought I would. If what you have to cook is small enough to fit, it uses a lot less energy than a full-size stove. It also creates a lot less heat which is especially important if you want your house to stay cool in summer. It works a lot better than a microwave for heating certain types of frozen food like fried chicken, fish fillets, french fries. It’s great for toasting bagels and slices of homemade bread that are too thick for my toaster. In fact it works so well at toasting anything that I hardly ever use the regular toaster any more.
I wouldn’t want both a toaster and a toaster oven eating up my counter space, but then again I’d solve that problem by ditching the toaster–the toaster oven is much more flexible. We can do anything we’d do in a toaster plus baking small things like a couple of potatoes or a half-dozen biscuits or a single pot pie or a 2-person bread pudding if we don’t want to heat up the kitchen or if our oven dies and it takes us a while to track down another one that fits in the weird-sized hole. We’re not going to be doing any roasting or other serious cooking in it, but then again I’m not going to do any serious cooking in my microwave either.
We use ours quite regularly. (Mrs. FtG cooks a lot.) Warms up faster and heats up the kitchen less than the big oven. Great for those 1-2 person items.
We have one and I hate it. Because we have it out on the counter the toaster is stuck up in a cabinet somewhere and any time I want to make toast the bread only toasts on one side so it has to be flipped halfway through. I wish we’d get rid of the toaster oven and use the toaster but my boyfriend loves it so I am stuck flipping the toast for now.
I don’t have a toaster oven, but I have a pizzaz pizza oven, which fills pretty much the same role. I find I use it a LOT more than my oven, especially since I’m normally cooking for just myself. It heats up much faster, cleans easier, uses less power, and even gives you a much better view so you can more easily tell when the food is done.
Downsides? It is an open air design, and fills the place with the smell of cooking, making the wait for food seemingly much longer. >_<
The other downside is that, yes, it is one more utensil that takes up counter space(quite a lot if you get a larger model), so take their kitchen size into consideration as well. I use mine enough to warrant that loss, but some may not.
They take up too much counter space for something they may never use.
We have a toaster oven, no regular toaster. We like things like bagels and bread that doesn’t come sliced, which are hard to slice thinly enough to fit in a regular toaster. Also, we like roasted garlic, and it seems such a waste to heat up the oven for an hour to roast a small head of garlic.
My ex-husband bought me one of those Pizzaz Pizza things when they first came out, and I thought it was incredibly stupid. It took up way too much counter space, and was pretty much a one-use gadget. The toaster oven is much more efficient, IMO. The pizza oven is completely open, so I would have to think there’d be incredible heat loss.
I graciously let him have it when we split up. 
My toaster oven heats from the top and bottom, so it toasts bread and bagels without any flipping.
My oven isn’t working correctly and it’s too hot to use anyway, so I upgraded my toaster oven to a convection toaster oven and took the tiny toaster oven to work. I love the convection oven. I can fit a whole chicken in it and it cooks beautifully. It’s a little bigger than most toaster ovens but smaller than a regular oven but as long as the item or pan fits in the convection oven it can cook anything the regular oven can.
But that said, not everyone loves a toaster oven and I wouldn’t get one for a gift unless I knew the recipient wanted one.
I like my toaster oven too, and don’t like toasters, for all of the reasons listed above.
What I would have posted. I think a dedicated toaster is sort of a waste of counter space and money.
And I have never in my life heard of flipping the bread to get both sides toasted in a TO. Every TO I’ve ever owned has toasted both sides at the same time. One side might not get the “grill lines” effect like the other, but it’s no longer soft and bread-y, so as far as I’m concerned, the whole thing is toasted.
In ours, the bottom heating element isn’t quite as strong as the top, so toast is visibly paler on the bottom than the top. But it’s still toasted, and I just put my butter/jelly/whatever on that side and go on. I could see it bothering someone like my dad, though.
My daughter uses the toaster oven practically every day to make her lunches (heating up frozen burritos, that sort of thing.) I use it to roast garlic. It frees up the oven for the bigger meals and doesn’t use as much electricity.
Many toaster ovens have a couple of different tray height options. Maybe you could just lower the rack so it’s closer to the bottom heating elements?
Edit: oh, and yeah. I’m in the “ditch the toaster, get a toaster oven” crowd for all the same reasons.
Well, hell, maybe I’ll pick one up myself! Sounds like it might be handy!
Can anyone recommend a good toaster oven cookbook to pack with it?
I don’t think you need a special toaster oven cookbook. The toaster ovens I’ve had work just like regular ovens when it comes to baking, so no special instructions are needed, although you may need to make smaller portions in smaller pans.
I agree with what others have said. I like toaster ovens and I think they’re terrific little tools for reheating things, baking thins, and even toasting things.
I had a toaster oven but it belonged to a roommate who just moved out and took it with her. I don’t know what to do now without it! I make and freeze a lot of small, sandwich-like things, like samosas, quesadillas, etc. and it feels so stupid to heat up the entire oven to warm one stupid quesadilla, but the microwave makes them horribly mushy. I think I’m going to buy my own soon.
I also lived in a place without a full oven, and I made things just about everything in it that I would normally use a full oven for. Baking cookies was the one thing that didn’t work.
Get one where the outside stays cool to the touch. Even then, it probably won’t be cool enough not to melt bread wrappers left on top of it, so don’t put things like that on top of the toaster oven. Here speaks the voice of experience.