Used my toaster oven today to make an egg sandwich. I put both slices of bread in, stacked. That way the outside of my sandwich is toasted and the inside is not.
I cooked in a dorm for 2 years with nothing but a toaster oven and hot plate, and you can do a lot with them.
Absolutely, and even if you have an oven, you’ll probably use it less if you have a decent toaster oven. I kind of overdid it with my current toaster oven, and only use the regular oven when the pan I’m using won’t fit in the toaster oven these days.
A regular oven and/or a microwave oven handle those tasks for me.
This. I bought a toaster oven a few years ago and I don’t think I’ve used my regular oven since. I have a Pyrex container that fits inside it, and I don’t see any point in heating up the kitchen when the toaster oven does the job.
I usually have baked potatoes along with steak, and the steak is occupying the broiler in the regular oven. Not to mention that the toaster oven is more energy efficient.
When my oven was broken we managed to get by with the toaster oven, though it is limited in not being able to cook a chicken or turkey. And there is only two of us, wouldn’t have worked when the kids were still here. For one person I can see it.
My parents knew a guy, even older than them, who was a GE employee and owned a GE brand ‘broiler’. Sort of like a big hotpot or rice cooker, but metal. For cooking turkey or stuff. Always thought it was a valuable kitchen appliance, and was bemused that the rest of the world hadn’t agreed.
I’m curious what you make in your oven (toaster or otherwise). Because I NEVER use the “oven” feature of my toaster oven except to make grilled cheese, and have been thinking of replacing it with a dedicated toaster. But I use my oven all the time for:
- roasting chicken
- roasting rack of lamb, or similar-sized hunk-o-meat
- baking pie
- baking cookies
- baking cornbread
- superstitiously heating all the takeout that we’ve put in our own dishes, to banish covid cooties. (I suspect we aren’t heating long enough for this to be effective)
The only one of those that could fit in the toaster oven is cookies, but then it would take a gazillion cooking cycles to finish the batch, whereas I can shove them all in my big oven on three trays, and if I move the trays around, they usually come out fine.
(I can imagine baking potatoes in the toaster oven, but not being fond of baked potatoes, I can’t remember the last time I cooked them. Our usual starches are rice, pasta, and bread, and I sometimes boil potatoes or fry them in slices.)
There are some frozen foods where the preferred cooking method is the oven rather than the microwave; offhand I can think of Innov-Asian dinners, Barber Chicken Kiev, and salmon patties (which I tend to burn if I try pan-frying them. I have also cooked sweet potatoes in the toaster oven. Occasionally I pick up a cooked lamb shank at the farmers market, and I’ll use the toaster over to heat it up.
I don’t do any baking, but I agree that things like bread, pies and cookies wouldn’t fit well. I also have a slow-cooker which I use for roasts, stews, and chili. I live alone, so if I cook those I freeze some of it for later.
Pretty much all of those will fit in my toaster oven (yes, I said I went overboard) except the rack of lamb. We cooked conrbread in our old toaster oven that was nothing special, and pie would have been do-able in it. Since I got the larger toaster oven, just about the only thing I’ve used the regular oven for is large pans of bread.
Here too, my toaster is a 4 slice long slot. Kitchen Aid. it’s only about 4in wide and fits nicely in a lower cabinet.
It has a bagel setting that I believe toasts the tops more than the bottoms, if you put the bagel in the right way. Also has a defrost and a reheat button.
I used to have a Delonghi toaster oven. It was great, but no room at the inn to keep it.
I’m not offering a brand name because I frequently make one slice of toast and haven’t noticed much if any difference between its sides. I’d love a toaster oven but my wife doesn’t like them and I’ve squandered my counter space on a dehydrator.
The place where we stay when we’re in St Martin has a stove/oven but also a huge toaster oven. It has instructions printed on it in broken English.
The toast setting cracks me up because it says “toastar“, so that’s how we pronounce it.
You must have a very large toaster oven. Neither my cast iron frying pan nor my muffin tins fit in my moderately large toaster oven. And a whole chicken is larger than a rack of lamb… I just possibly could fit the lamb in the toaster oven. (But it has no self cleaning mode, so I’d prefer not to try.)
You’ve inspired me to check, and my smaller pie pans fit in the toaster oven!
My regular oven is gas, which seems more efficient than the electric toaster oven. It’s really well insulated, and doesn’t heat the kitchen much (and is directly under a hood, so I can vent hot air), it has a much more even and accurate temperature than the toaster oven, and it has that aforementioned self-cleaning setting.
So I’m not inclined to start using the toaster oven for any of my oven stuff. But I’ve learned something today. If the oven dies, i could make due with the toaster oven for a lot of stuff.
I have a fairly large toaster oven; it will hold a 9" x 13" pan and with the shelf at it’s lowest setting will hold something about 5" high. It also has a broiler setting, which I haven’t tried to use yet.
I do have a six-muffin pan which will fit into it. I keep telling myself I should try to make corn muffins one of these days, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Yeah, it was time to replace the toaster oven, and I found one that would double as a proofer, and lost my mind and bought it. It’ll hold a 12" pizza stone, it’s an air fryer and convection oven. Anything larger than that stone is a complete no-go, though.
I use mine for baked potatoes, as I said, but also for croissants, bagels (I don’t like toasted bagels,) muffins, and for warming up pizza.
Correction it’s not a kitchen aid toaster but a Cuisinart I’ve only had it about 20 years.
I have a toaster oven and in the past two years I think I’ve used it a half-dozen times. I don’t have a regular toaster.