With every batch of toast made, most toaster ovens get hotter, which can leave you with charred pieces of toast if you’re not watching closely. The FlashXpress compensates for the increased temperature by automatically reducing the cook time, so the results are the same every time. These were some of the fastest toasting times of all the toaster ovens we tested. Hamilton Beach® Convection Toaster Ovens are versatile and have all the traditional settings you look for in a countertop toaster oven, including toast, bake, and broil settings.
Of course, you should always read the manual before use and adhere to any safety guidelines contained within. Most sold out products will be available for purchase at our store located in Santa Ana. Along with our in-house experts, our team analyzes thousands of product reviews from the most trusted websites.
However, the Easy Reach didn’t score as well on the ease of its interface. Although consisting of only two simple knobs, the oven’s operation isn’t overly intuitive or as simple to use as it appears. That said, it’s not overly complicated, but it does require a few peeks at the owner’s manual. As for accessories, this oven comes with a baking pan, oven rack, and slide-out crumb tray. The Hamilton Beach Easy Reach 4-Slice is able to do most basic cooking tasks well and does so at a great price. You can’t fit huge portions in this compact oven, but what does fit inside will be cooked or baked consistently better than what you’d expect from such an inexpensive oven.
Depending on the household, it can fill a surprisingly wide gap between the microwave and a traditional oven. Need your snacks warmed up quickly, but hate that microwave sogginess? Need your potatoes, pies or side dishes baked while your main course is taking up the oven? The toaster oven is a perfect solution, and it does all that while using less power.
A smaller silver pan and a coordinating broiler rack can be used for roasting small foods as well as for baking. Also, the FlashXpress has a somewhat flimsy, stamped-metal crumb tray (versus the sturdier trays that come with our other picks). After only a few cycles, the FlashXpress tray was already warped. But the warping didn’t make the tray overly difficult to pull out or to clean.
This model comes with the most basic accessories, including an oven rack, a baking pan, and a crumb tray. More-advanced digital models will alert you once the oven is preheated to a set temperature, but the Hamilton Beach lacks this feature. The instruction manual hamilton beach toaster oven recommends allowing 5 minutes for the toaster oven to preheat. Even so, a charming, old-school ding does alert you when the timer goes off. We preferred this subtle sound to the ear-shattering beeps on some digital models, like the Wolf Gourmet Countertop Oven.
However, I’m accustomed to precise digital controls and presets and wished for those as I turned the dials. We appreciated the compact size of the Breville Compact Smart Oven (BOV650XL), but it didn’t do well in many of our tests. It also costs more than the Panasonic FlashXpress, which we like better overall. The Zojirushi ET-WMC22 toasted so unevenly that the bread looked like someone with terrible aim had zapped it with a laser.
It comes with two oven racks so you can cook more food at once—an addition we appreciate with the Cuisinart too. It also comes with an air fry/dehydrate basket rack and a broiling rack that fits inside its enamel roasting pan. But we still prefer the Cuisinart’s ceramic pizza stone over the Breville’s nonstick pizza pan (though Breville does sell a pizza stone separately for around $30). As in other toaster oven air fryers, a shallow basket is provided for air frying food in a single layer. We were very happy with the browning and crisping on breaded chicken breasts. Brussels sprouts and frozen crinkle fries came out lightly browned and crisped.
While you wait, take the time to wash the rack and accessories in warm, soapy water. Some higher-end s have a roll-top door. This opens upward and rolls over the top of the unit rather than opening outward and potentially getting in your way or taking up counter space. Odds are you won’t be sharing much of the frozen foods you cook in the Easy Reach. Due to its compact size, it barely accommodates a 9-inch pizza, while the most other ovens fit a standard size 12-inch pizza.