How to Find the Best Toaster Oven for Your Kitchen

The best pick for you will offer functionality that matches your cooking habits. Here are the most common features.

Air-frying: Like a typical air fryer, these combo models use high heat and a convection fan to circulate hot air to “fry” food with little or no oil.

Steaming: A steam function can bring that day-old baguette back to life by enveloping the bread in moisture and lightly toasting its surface. This process revives the loaf’s inner moisture and keeps its flavor from escaping.

Convection: This feature evenly distributes hot air inside the oven and removes extra moisture, producing flakier crusts, deeper flavors, and more tender meats in less time than conventional baking. (It also makes certain other features possible, such as air-frying and dehydrating.)

Rotisserie: A spit-and-fork assembly rotates food inside the oven while it roasts so you get rotisserie chicken without a trip to the supermarket.

Proofing: A bread-baking craze has infiltrated the toaster oven market. Some models use a halogen light to create the perfect environment for activating yeast.

Slow cooking: Soups, stews, and fall-off-the-bone meat get the low-and-slow treatment over the course of several hours. Choose from high and low slow-cook modes to accommodate your dish.

Dehydrating: Use this feature to make your own dried fruit snacks.

Preprogrammed cook settings: Some models have set-it-and-forget-it modes to simplify tasks such as baking cookies and achieving the perfect crust on homemade pizza. Just keep in mind that these appliances have their limitations. For cookies, you’re limited to a half-pan (a small batch). And you won’t be able to accommodate a 16-inch pizza, but most store-bought frozen varieties will fit.

It’s important to note that our toaster oven ratings don’t reflect how well these special features work. CR’s ratings are based on in-depth testing of the functions that all toaster ovens share—toasting, reheating, baking, and the like—as well as brand reliability and owner satisfaction data derived from our surveys of CR members who bought 30,619 toaster ovens between 2016 and 2024.