• Hamilton Beach 31123D: This digital toaster oven cooks four slices of toast evenly and has a sloping "Easy Reach" door that lifts up to help avoid burning your hand on hot glass. Overall, this basic toaster oven performed well and is a more budget-friendly alternative to the Panasonic FlashXpress and Breville Mini Smart Oven.
• Oster TSSTTVMNDG: (Update: Out of stock)As soon as I lifted it out of the box, it felt cheaply made. Sure enough, one of the wire racks had already broken loose in transit. The controls also felt clunky and not very intuitive. The toasting performance was satisfactory, although it didn't brown as evenly as other models, and it takes a long six minutes to toast bread to medium.
• Balmuda Toaster: This trendy $309 option uses traditional heating elements and steam to keep bread and other items moist while cooking. The oven looks great and did an above-average job with toast. It's also super fast and holds heat well, but it's very small and thus hard to recommend at such a bloated price.
• GE Digital Air Fry Toaster Oven G9OAAASSPSS: This larger toaster oven offers a decent air fryer mode and did well in most of my testing. It takes longer than others to toast bread, and I wasn't in love with the dials and display. It's not a bad machine, but it costs $219 at full price. For an air fryer toaster oven, I prefer the Ninja Foodi. If it's just a basic toaster oven you seek, there are better and cheaper options.
• Cruxxgg: This oven has a sharp, modern look, but we found it difficult to control the heat. The glass also burned after a few uses, making it unsightly and hard to see inside.
• Cuisinart TOB-1010 Toaster Oven Broiler: This toaster heated unevenly and is missing some basic features we expect on an oven that costs $100 -- namely, a timer.

I set out to cook a wide variety of common toaster oven fodder. With the exception of the toast tests, where I looked at each toaster oven's individual settings for light, medium and dark toast, I used standardized temperature and cook times and followed the recommendations on the box for whatever I was cooking, wherever possible.

Toasting capabilities: Speed and consistency

Making toast is one of the critical tasks for a toaster. I mean, it's right there in the name. I hauled in a whole lot of bread to see how fast and evenly each oven made this breakfast and sandwich staple. 

Most low-end toaster ovens use a built-in kitchen timer to set the broiling, toasting and cooking time. Typically, those timers include a couple of preset options for toasting: medium toast, dark toast and -- in some cases -- a light setting, barely toasted bread, too. Higher-end models with an LCD will usually let you dial into a specific doneness level when you're toasting. You'll typically get about six or seven settings to choose from with those, each with preprogrammed toasting times. That's more precise than turning a timer knob and worth it if you're a stickler for the perfect shade of golden brown.

For my purposes, I toasted four slices of thin, white sandwich bread in each toaster oven on medium. This test aimed to see how evenly each oven toasts in all areas of the oven and how well-calibrated the medium toast setting is. Evenness is especially important when you're making breakfast for a group. Ideally, you'll want them all to come out looking as close to identical as possible.

I also tested two pieces of bread on the lowest doneness setting (light) and the highest (dark), to see how well these presets were calibrated. After each of the three toast tests, I photographed the results and made sure to let the toaster oven cool to room temperature before testing again.

For overall evenness, the results were surprisingly uniform across the board, with the exception of the Cruxgg, which toasted extremely unevenly. The Hamilton Beach, Panasonic's FlashXpress and Breville Mini Smart Oven were among the top finishers, with mostly even cooking and a solid medium color. The Balmuda also toasted four slices of bread evenly.

The FlashXpress also had the most accurately calibrated settings. The light setting delivered barely-there toasting while the dark setting produced proper dark pieces of toast without burning them. The Breville and Balmuda also nailed the light and dark toast cycles when I put them through their paces.

Besides the Cruxgg, which burned the toast, even when set to medium, none of the doneness presets were too far out of whack, although toast made in the Hamilton Beach model was oddly about the same color for dark as it was for medium.

Cooking times

Speed was also a factor. I think we can all agree that, on a busy morning, the less time you have to wait for toast the better. I noted the time it took for each toaster to complete a cycle on each of the three settings: light, medium and dark.

In terms of pure speed, the infrared Panasonic was the fastest, living up to its FlashXpress nickname. It toasted to a nice medium in just two and a half minutes. The Balmuda also toasted four slices in under three minutes, while the Breville Mini Smart oven did it in three. The slowest was the clunky Oster, which took well over six minutes to hit medium, followed by the GE, which took nearly five minutes and was still underdone.

Temperature consistency and accuracy

If you plan to make things like cookies and pizza or use your toaster to make more complicated recipes, you'll want an oven that holds its heat consistently over time. To test the consistency of each oven, I tested how much fluctuation each oven experienced when set to 300 degrees F for 15 minutes. I used a RisePro thermocouple thermometer to measure the highest temp, the lowest temp and the average temp throughout that period.

All of the ovens performed fairly well in this test, with the exception of the Cruxgg. The Breville Smart Mini and Panasonic FlashXpress both held an average temp of 310 degrees F, just 10 degrees more than the target temp, which is a good mark for any oven. The Balmuda Steam oven can only be set to 350, 400 or 450 degrees F, so I ran the same test at 350 degrees F. It also did well, running an average of just 12 degrees above the target temp. 

In a shocker, the Comfee toaster oven fluctuated the least -- only 15 degrees from start to finish -- placing first in the consistency test, but that is likely because it is both small and has no convection fan to stir the air up. The Comfee was fairly accurate, too, although it ran an average of 22 degrees F hotter than the temp I set it for. See full results below. 

Testing the convection and bake functions

To test each toaster's power and ability to cook more substantial foods, I baked three pizza bites placed on a rack in different parts of the oven. This was to test how accurately each toaster melts cheese, and another test to see how evenly the cooking is spread out across the oven. The box recommends baking a frozen pizza at 425 degrees F for 18 minutes, so that's what I did in each toaster oven. 

In addition to pizza bites, I cooked a frozen Jamaican meat pie in each oven as directed by the box: 25 minutes at 400 degrees F. This test was designed to see how well an oven would cook denser frozen food without burning the outside. We've all bitten into what appears to be perfectly browned and previously frozen food only to find it still frozen in the center. Not fun.

In the Jamaican patty test, all of the ovens heated the frozen meat pies through the center, but the Breville and Balmuda produced the best browning on the outer pastry shell. The hand pie that emerged from the Balmuda Oven (see below) was nearly overcooked (and perhaps it would be for some folks), but that's just how I like mine. 

The FlashXpress just slightly overcooked the patty, while the Cruxgg burnt it well past edibility. While all of the ovens produced meat pies that were hot in the center, the least outer browning came from the Hamilton Beach toaster and Oster. Not surprising, considering both ovens ran cool in the temperature consistency and accuracy test.

Toaster buttons and display

I found the toaster ovens with digital displays easiest to program since you dial into your preferred level of doneness on a six- or seven-point scale rather than guesstimating with a timer knob. My favorite display was on Breville's Mini Smart Oven, which was simple and easy to use with dials that accurately adjust the cooking time for both doneness and the number of slices. This model also has an "a bit more" button and a cool-down mode to stop cooking faster. I also liked the Panasonic FlashXpress' display which is slightly simpler than the Breville with fewer special modes but more programs for specific items such as frozen waffles, frozen pizza and even hash browns. 

In truth, I don't find toaster oven cooking programs very helpful, and I rarely use them. Since every brand, be it frozen pizza, waffles or mozzarella sticks, vary in size and density, it's generally best to follow the instructions on the box. 

My least favorite display was on the Oster, which had one-dimensional backset buttons and a wonky digital screen that offered very little information. The buttons would often not react and required a forceful push, sometimes two. The super-cheap Comfee Toaster has manual dials and no display. Manual dials are difficult to set accurately both for temperature and time. They often make a ticking sound as well, which can be annoying.

The easiest toasters to clean

This was less of a cooking test and more of a cleaning test, but one that's near and dear to my heart. Every toaster oven comes with an aluminum baking sheet with a nonstick coating, but some are much easier to clean than others. Because these sheets are mostly fitted to the oven, you're sort of stuck using that one until you replace the toaster entirely, so it's nice when they come clean and don't stain or collect gunk after just a few sessions. 

After the pizza bites finished cooking, there was inevitably some spilled sauce and cheese left on the sheet. I allowed the pan to cool enough to handle without gloves and then scrubbed it vigorously for one minute using a sponge, hot water and Dial dish soap. The easiest baking sheets to clean belonged to the Breville Mini Oven (which is black, so that probably helps), the Panasonic FlashXpress and the Comfee toaster. 

The trays that came with the Hamilton Beach and GE Toaster remained the most stained after a minute of cleaning, with the rest falling somewhere in the middle.  

Beyond performance, there are several considerations to make before buying a toaster oven, such as size, functionality, design and overall value.

Size and capacity

Consider both the counter space you have to devote to your toaster, what you'll typically use it to cook and how much of it you'll be cooking. If you have four kids who all eat toast most mornings, a bigger model will save you from having to cook in batches. If it's just you or one other house member, a smaller toaster oven might be the better pick.

Features and settings

You'll also want to think about what you'll be using your toaster oven for most often. If you like toast with your coffee each morning, prioritize a toaster oven with a precise preset. If you like to broil things like hamburgers, make sure you get a toaster oven with a high-top rack position just 2 or 3 inches underneath the heating elements. The Breville Mini Smart Oven, GE and Hamilton Beach are good examples of broil-friendly ovens.

Some of the temperature controls are more imprecise than others, which may be a nuisance depending on how and what you plan to cook. The Balmuda can only be set in increments of 50 degrees, for instance, while the Panasonic FlashXpress can be set in increments of 35 degrees. This didn't bother me too much, but it does mean you can't hit a precise 400 degrees F and may have to adjust for certain