On The Toaster Oven

The toaster oven is a miracle in a small package. It's efficient, it's portable, and it gets the work done. What's not to like!

Ever since I realized our 'toaster' was also a mini electric oven, I haven't heated our large gas oven which ends up heating the house, takes hours to cool down, and a solid ten-minute to warm up. It guzzles gas like a...an...American car. Yeah sure, the large oven has a better thermal mass so if you put in three pounds of frozen foods in there you're temperature's still going to be close to the target heat and there won't be too much fluctuations. But I don't do anything with three pounds worth of frozen items in the oven. Often, it's a potato or two or three, or half a butternut squash, or couple of florets of broccoli. The large oven is a total waste of energy and time.

It's hard to maintain exact temperature on a small oven because there's so 'little' of it, you open the door and out goes ten degrees just like that. Put something on top of it by accident and bam, another ten gone! To make it up however, since the volume is so little, it also heats up faster. And besides, I have never, not once in all of my memory of baking, made anything that needed precise temperature control. Large ovens have temperature controls by 10's of degrees as well because the actual measurement of heat is not precise in consumer electrics unless you're spending big bucks. It's an illusion of control, a control that you have no use either way. Learn to let it go, and thrive in the ease of the toaster oven!

The other point that's made about toaster ovens is that since the food is so close to the heating element, it could end up getting charring or developing a film etcetera. Could be, if you're baking fish that needs precise control and you want to worry about the skin, or dunno, some sort of cake whose precise humidity you need to maintain throughout the process. I'm not doing either of that, and my baking needs involve basically heating something to a crisp, or doing basic bakes. I could make pizza and cake in the toaster oven, it would come out fine. As I'm writing this, it's looking like a good idea to make pizza in the toaster oven. Because it can get really hot real fast, the heating element is quite close to the surface so there's going to be some good char, and you can do an 'in and out' real quick, something that's preferred for 'authentic' pizza. While the better pizzas are cooked at a temperature range far above what the poor puny electric toaster can do, our gas oven cannot get any hotter either, so that's a tie.

It can toast bread, it can heat up frozen garlic bread, it can make cool roasted potatoes, crisp up broccoli and Brussels sprouts. It will happily deal with a mini-pie of a pizza, and warm up whatever leftovers you have from the night before. It's the perfect kitchen appliance, the toaster oven.