My wife bought me a new toaster oven, to replace the grody old one I’ve been using for the past couple of decades. I mostly used the old one for making bacon, several times a week. This new one isn’t big enough for bacon (or my 8x8 baking dish). This morning I used the salvaged tray from the old oven to cook bacon in the regular oven. In addition to bacon, I also cooked chicken breast tenderloins, chicken thighs, and chicken wings, often with broccoli alongside.
Given that I avoid carbohydrates (breads, pasta, rice, pizza, potatoes, etc.), what are some things I can cook in a small toaster oven?
Pretty much anything you can put in a conventional oven, but in smaller quantities. I don’t have specific recommendations, but things like sausages or a chicken breast/thigh will work well. And it’s convection, so you can air-fry.
Yup. It’s been a very lucrative sales semi-grift for some companies, although air fryers tend to have stronger fans, so cooking time is shortened and you get a crisper coating.
Reheat pizza, or any other food that needs crisping. Cook a frozen meal. I cooked a couple of frozen chicken cordon bleus yesterday. Roast a hunk of fish. I roast black cod in mine. It’d work well for that blackened salmon dish you’ve posted about.
We actually hardly ever use the toaster oven anymore except for the above. Maybe once every 2 or 3 weeks.
I use mine to roast vegetables and bake potatoes (among many other things). It’s a great alternative to heating up the big oven in the summer, and it gets to temp quickly.
Exterior width is 15.5 inches. I haven’t measured the cooking compartment. My 8x8 baking dish will not fit because it has ‘handles’. No cut-out that I saw.
Come to think of it, we do tend to warm things up in the toaster oven instead of the microwave oven.
Fish (tilapia, salmon) is too big for the new oven. Although I have cooked fish in the old toaster oven, I prefer to cook fish in the big oven,
That gets the cast-iron treatment in the big oven. (Sadly, my wife can’t handle the spices anymore. )
That’s about what mine is, and about 11” deep. Some of your Trade Joe’s freezer case foods should heat well in it. The bacon-wrapped scallops, for example. I’ve been using mine for the TJ’s shrimp paste on sugar cane, too.
Also mine. I do most of our daily oven cooking in it. It just doesn’t seem reasonable to heat up the huge oven for food for two, be it a couple of baked potatoes, roasted vegetables, a meatloaf, a chicken or fish dish, or whatever.
Toaster ovens certainly come in various cavity sizes. I hope the OP’s wife hasn’t inadvertently downsized them just below practical cooking size.
I just measured and my cavity is 12"w x 12"d. It’s 4.5" tall with no catch tray and the wireframe rack on the lower guides, or 2.75" tall with the catch tray on the lower guides and the wireframe rack on the upper guides. Plenty of bakeware or small roasting pans can fit in that space.
My 11" dinner plates go in there very nicely for reheating whatever. One at a time of course.
Not really. I had one of those and the air fry/convection oven didn’t work very well. As you noted later, real air fryers have much stronger fans. It’s great for making toast (which OP doesn’t eat) and that’s kind of it in my experience. Warming up pizza and leftovers are better for me in a microwave. Baking is better in a big oven. If you don’t have a real air fryer, it works ok for heating up frozen food like taquitos. It’s in that weird niche where there is mostly something else that’s common and does the job better.
All of the things that OP made in the old toaster oven (except maybe bacon) are outstanding in an air fryer but not the puny one in that toaster over.
There happened to have been six chicken wing segments (‘radius and ulna’) in the freezer. I’ve defrosted them, and will try this crispy chicken wing recipe later. It says to air-fry at 400º, but it doesn’t look like you can choose an air-fry temperature on the B&D. The temperature knob just has a ‘air fry’ (and ‘toast’, and ‘broil’) setting.
Nowadays “toaster oven” describes a bewildering array of sizes, capabilities, and price tags. The category name is almost misleading it’s now so broad.
Lotta ways for a partly thought-through purchase to be just the wrong thing.
I routinely heat up meals in my toaster oven that I’ve purchased from the local grocer. It’s more efficient than heating up a full-sized oven. You could even broil a small steak/chop in it. My toaster oven is probably larger than yours, though.
Well, they didn’t come out looking like the ones at the link. I followed the recipe, and I’ve eaten one. I’m thinking they should have had half the salt and twice the baking powder.
Living single, I used a cheapie tin toaster oven exclusively. I’d wrap a chop in aluminum foil with thin sliced vegetables and bake till done (that was the most cooking from scratch I did)… After I got married, we had an upgraded toaster oven we used more than the regular oven (also used the microwave a lot)…. Now living alone again, I love my air fryer. I’m toying with the idea of getting one of those Ninja Foodi ovens I see at the crack of dawn on infomercials.
When I was in college, long before microwaves, I cooked everything that fit in one. Meat loaf definitely. We even made duck in one (I think we borrowed additional ovens from others on the floor.) Pork chops, lamb chops. I don’t remember any issues using it.
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