Even though the basket allows for air to circulate around the bottom of whatever you’re cooking, I’ve found the top cooks faster, so I think flipping your food is helpful for the best result. When we test wings, we simply sprinkle them with salt and place them on the rack. We don’t add any oil, so we can see whether they brown nicely and/or stick on their own. We assess how quickly and evenly they cook and whether they are juicy or dry. We also use this test to help us evaluate whether the oven is prone to smoking and how easy it is to clean afterward. Wirecutter is the product recommendation service from The New York Times.
The Café Couture Oven with Air Fry looks snazzy, and aside from its subpar baking results, it did well in our tests. Unfortunately, the printed labels on the buttons started to wear off after only a few uses. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. All of the controls are contained on an easy-to-navigate LED panel.
This thing can air fry, bake, broil, convection bake, convection broil, and toast. All of these picks also excelled in basic toaster oven tests like toasting, baking and broiling. The Cosori Original Air Fryer Toaster Oven was the best-performing cuisinart air fryer oven model we tried under $225. This oven consistently did well in our tests, in some cases performing as well as models costing double the price. It shares many of the same features as some of the more expensive models we tested, too.
The digital controls work with a dial, and are easy to read and navigate. I loved the Ninja’s one-minute preheat, its light for checking on your food during cooking, and its quiet operation. When this oven isn’t in use, you can flip it over and stand it up at the back of the countertop.
Absolutely worth the counter space IMO, and we don’t have a lot of it in our city condo. It is the only appliance other than our espresso machine and drip coffee maker that has been awarded coveted counter space. This is a really cuisinart choppers big one–in a regular air fryer, you can’t see your food cooking so it’s really hard to monitor. Air frying definitely has a learning curve, especially with the Cusinart, I’m told, because it tends to run pretty hot.
At the end of cooking the chicken was golden brown with a beautifully crisped skin and my meat probe confirmed it was thoroughly cooked through. The meat was moist, tender and succulent – a terrific result given the short cooking time. I also used the bake setting to bake up a small batch of my favorite granola recipe. In my normal oven it takes 20 minutes to bake with a stir halfway through, plus there’s the ten minutes or so that the oven takes to preheat.
I did though and it’s worth reading through the tips on how to get the best from each function as well as for recommendations on shelf positions and there are some recipes too. It’s large enough to heat up food for the kids or a meal for us, but we’re not making a full dinner for four people. It would heat up enough frozen nuggets for a family and you could make 4 chicken breasts or veggies and prepare the rest of the meal elsewhere, so it really depends on what you’re looking for.
I followed the recipe in the instruction manual for classic roast chicken. I was skeptical about the 45 minute cook time, as my chicken packaging advised almost two hours in a normal oven for a 4lb chicken. Nevertheless, I stuck to the recipe and cooked it on convection bake without preheating for 25 minutes at 400oF, turning it down to 350oF for the final 20 minutes. The bagel was nicely browned in around four minutes, which is slightly longer than the 2-3 minutes that it might usually take in one of the best toasters. But it’s still quicker than a broiler, since it doesn’t need time to preheat. Another plus is that there’s enough room for six slices of bread at once and you can toast up really thick sliced bread that wouldn’t fit in a standard toaster.
It also fits a 9-by-13-inch baking pan (without handles), and it can just squeeze in a 12-cup muffin tin (ours measured 14 by 10.75 inches), so it really acts as a secondary oven in your kitchen. If you use a quarter-sheet tray on each of its two racks, that’s equal to the cooking surface of a standard half sheet you’d use in a full-size oven. You may even be inclined to use this oven more than your full-size oven in the warmer months, since it will likely keep your kitchen cooler. This model also comes with an air frying basket, a baking pan, a 9-by-13-inch enamel broiling rack, a roasting pan and rack, a crumb tray, and a 13-inch nonstick steel pizza pan.
The TOB-260N1 has four slots for the racks, with metal hooks that pull out the middle rack when you open the door (similar in function to the Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro’s magnetic mechanism). The Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro didn’t toast bread quite as evenly as our runner-up pick, but it excelled at cooking just about everything else we prepared in it. We also prefer the Cuisinart TOB-260N1’s ceramic pizza stone over the Breville’s nonstick pizza pan, since the coating will wear down over time (though Breville does sell a separate pizza stone for around $30).