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Toaster ovens

Candice and I have been trying to figure out how to best use some Sears gift certificates we got for Christmas, and one of the possibilities was to get a toaster oven. So we’ve read some reviews online, and looked at what Sears has available, and are still pretty much right where we started. Why is choosing a toaster oven so hard?

[toaster oven]We figured the best place to start would be the middle of the price range — that leaves out the really flimsy stuff and the ones that are overkill like Kitchenaid. Then we start looking at sizes: half of them are measured in slices (4 or 6), half of them in volume, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship between the two outside of “some are bigger than others”. Some have digital controls, but then some of the high-end ones still have knobs, and then there are even ones that have digital controls that are knobs. Some of them are convection, but you don’t always get convection on the better ones, and I’m not sure how important convection heating is in a 1/4 cubic foot space. There are some obvious no-brainers, like getting one with a temperature control rather than a toast-darkness control, but then some of the expensive ones have darkness controls instead of temperature knobs! And I can’t tell if toast darkness is a function of time or temperature or both on those that do have them.

Then you start reading reviews. It seems for every toaster oven I’ve checked, there are half a dozen people saying “It’s great!” and half a dozen saying “It’s crap!” and their descriptions don’t even seem to be about the same machine. And best as I can tell, there are no buyer’s guides out there; the only thing close I found is this one from Good Housekeeping, which talks about models of things that aren’t quiiite the same as the ones available in Canada.

Maybe we’ll just get an immersion blender instead.

Rich

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8 responses to “Toaster ovens”

  1. We got one o’ these as a present, but I think it’s probably…a little lower-end than you’re looking. It works well and it’s cheap, but it doesn’t really have much in the way of features.

  2. Yeah, I basically want to get something that we can use instead of the oven for pretty much anything that isn’t the baking of bread. We don’t roast turkeys or anything else that requires that much space and heating ever, so a little box that heats up fast (and doesn’t heat the rest of the house in the summer) seems like a good idea to me.

    We don’t pay for hydro here, which is nice, but even then I figure we can still act as though we do!

  3. Get a blender (smoothies and very gourmet soups) or a slow cooker (I am fascinated by these and the concept that your meal is cooked to perfection for you…and someone I new in University made an apple cranberry crumble that would make a grandmother cry with a slow cooker)…

    My appliance dream is to own a bread machine.. my folks had one when I was younger and we used it so often that we burned the motor out.

  5. We have two regular blenders, neither of which ever get used, so the immersion blender is sort of a “Well, what if it worked this way around? Would we use it then?” thing. I can’t picture using a slow cooker that often since neither of us eat red meat. When you don’t have stuff that needs to slow-cook all day to get tender, it’s easier to throw a bunch of stuff in the rice cooker or the oven.

    In any case, we’ve got a wedding registry to fill too; this is just dealing with the gift cards burning a hole in our pocket. :-)

    I’m not sure about bread machines. I got one for my mother a few years ago, and she loves it, but we’d probably just use it for mixing and kneading even if we did have one, and at that point I’d rather have a good Kitchenaid mixer instead.

  8. Oh you THINK you would use a kitchenaid in lieu of a bread machine but bread machines are addictive. We used ours mostly for dinner rolls (ie take out and bake). I am 100% in favor of the bread machine – I can’t wait to get married just to put one on my registry (my imaginary registry as of now).

    If you havea gift card for Sears you could always get something splurge-like such as really high thread count sheets. That could potentially be more fun than a bread machine… :)