Prime choose
This Cuisinart mannequin offers impressively even cooking, a whopping nine-slice toast capability, a three-year guarantee, and a few helpful equipment.
The versatile Cuisinart Chef’s Convection Toaster Oven TOB-260N1 is without doubt one of the greatest toaster ovens we’ve discovered for greater jobs, like cooking a 13-inch pizza, roasting a complete hen, or toasting as much as 9 slices of bread without delay.
It toasted bread extra evenly than the opposite toaster ovens we tried at this value stage, and it has a greater guarantee, extra equipment, and one of many shortest preheating instances. Plus, the two-speed convection fan means it’s additionally good at air frying (although it’s not marketed to do that).
It toasts to a close to golden-brown perfection. Nook to nook, no different oven was as constant (except for the exorbitantly priced Wolf Gourmand Elite Countertop Oven with Convection). Equally priced giant toaster ovens concentrated warmth within the middle of the oven and had extra vital fall-off of warmth towards the sides.
It has among the many greatest equipment of any mannequin we’ve examined. The oven comes with two racks, a baking pan, and a broiling tray, and it’s the one mannequin we’ve examined since 2013 to incorporate a ceramic pizza stone (most opponents provide a flimsy steel pizza pan). The stone makes a crunchy golden-brown pizza crust and can be nice for baking bread and pies.
Cuisinart additionally sells the oven’s equipment individually, ought to it’s essential exchange them.
The oven cavity is roomy. It’s giant sufficient to suit a 5.5-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven or a 6-quart Lodge Dutch oven (with aluminum foil in lieu of their lids)—simply know that their weight causes the oven rack to bend barely.
It could additionally match a regular quarter-sheet tray (and for those who put a quarter-sheet tray on every of its two racks, that’s equal to a regular half-sheet pan you’d use in a full-size oven). Moreover, most 12-cup muffin tins or 13-by-9-inch baking pans (with out handles) match contained in the oven.
The Cuisinart toaster oven additionally has 4 slots for the racks, with steel hooks that pull out the center rack when the door is opened.
It was one of many quickest fashions to preheat to 350 °F. It took simply over three minutes.
It could robotically change temperatures halfway by means of cooking. The Twin Cook dinner setting permits you to program two cooking cycles again to again. For instance, for those who’re baking a pumpkin pie, you would use this setting to bake the pie at 425 °F for quarter-hour, then robotically scale back the temperature to 350 °F for the remaining 30 to 40 minutes. Our improve choose, the Breville Sensible Oven Air Fryer Professional, additionally has this function, which Breville calls Section Cook dinner.
The Cuisinart toaster oven additionally has a “+30s” button that permits you to add 30 seconds to any cooking operate—for those who maintain that button down you may as well modify the quantity of the beeps or flip them off solely.
Two convection speeds offer you extra management. Most toaster ovens have just one fan pace, however this Cuisinart mannequin has two: excessive and low. For air frying, we’ve discovered that the excessive setting works higher, because it cooks meals a bit of quicker.
Nonetheless, for those who plan to air fry usually and also you’re searching for an oven with a barely extra highly effective fan that can cook dinner even quicker and get meals a bit of crispier, we suggest our improve choose, the Breville Sensible Oven Air Fryer Professional (or, try our information to one of the best air fryer toaster ovens for extra choices).
We admire the three-year restricted guarantee. Most opponents provide simply one- or two-year warranties.
One caveat: If the oven turns into faulty beneath guarantee, Cuisinart received’t restore it—they’ll ask you to chop the twine and ship them an image of it, then ship you a completely new unit. They’ll even do that if the lightbulb burns out, which seems like a wasteful draw back to this in any other case glorious guarantee.
If one thing goes incorrect with the oven after the guarantee expires, Cuisinart will give you 20% off the retail value of a brand new oven and supply free transport.
How the Cuisinart Chef’s Convection Toaster Oven has held up
Flaws however not dealbreakers
- The one dial management is just not as intuitive as different fashions. The one knob features as a mixed selector for cook dinner time, temperature, and toast setting. As soon as we familiarized ourselves with it, nevertheless, we appreciated this smooth, pared-down interface.
- The timer begins counting down as quickly because the oven preheats. This may be annoying for those who’re not fairly able to put your meals within the oven, but it surely’s simple sufficient to regulate the timer when you’re prepared.
- The center shade setting for toasting (setting 4) is a bit darkish. We suggest utilizing setting 3 for making good golden-brown toast.
- The oven door lacks a useful rack-position key. A transparent key would inform you the place to position the rack for various duties (toasting, roasting, and extra). As a substitute, you’ll discover rack place numbers printed on the facet of the oven cavity and must seek the advice of the person handbook to decipher them.
