16 out of 16 people found this review helpful.
Good value
Date of Review: Apr 4, 2009
The Bottom Line: As a small oven, I would highly recommend it. If you just need a toaster, go with something smaller.
Since we generally cook for just the two of us, it seems such a waste of energy to fire up the oven for just baking a couple of potatoes, cooking a pizza or making brownies.
After considerable search, we purchased this toaster oven last year and have found it relatively easy to use and reliable. A big draw for us was the convection cooking feature. New Mexico gets hot in the summer and anything that allows us to cook quicker and cooler gets my vote.
I needed something big enough to handle more than just a bagel or toast and this one can do a variety of tasks. The slide-out crumb tray is easy to keep clean. The rack has several different adjustment levels. The bump out in the back and the curved front glass easily allows you to use bigger pans than is normally available for toaster ovens.
Using the convection feature, my brownies actually come out better than baking them in the oven.
But keep the instruction booklet handy. While the controls are relatively easy to use, they aren't really intuitive ... you'll need guidance until you get the hang of all the little quirks.
Although it can provide 6 slices of beautifully browned toast at one time, they tend to be a bit dried out -- likely due to the amount of time needed for the toasting because of how far the bread is from the top and bottom heating coils. I'll be keeping my little toaster for that job. But bagels fare very well -- I like being able to choose just the top element so that the bottom stays soft and untoasted.
The outside gets very hot while cooking for long periods of time. There are built in bumpers that keeps the unit safely away from your wall -- and don't store anything on top. But it cools down very quickly once it's off.
It's a rather large toaster oven -- good for using as an oven. Overkill if you just want to toast your bagels.
But overall, I love it and think it was well worth the money -- it provides us with a small oven that handles many different tasks and saves us a lot of propane money.
Goodmans
