Cooking large dishes or gourmet meals will never happen with the Hamilton Beach Easy Reach 4-Slice. It’s compact design lends itself to one-and-done, single-serving dishes. You should buy this toaster if you’re looking to save money and don’t need a large, multi-function hamilton beach mixer oven. This toaster is designed to bake simple snacks, re-heat leftovers, warm side dishes, or cook small, pre-made frozen meals. It’s great for after-school goodies and would also be perfect for a college student or someone living the studio apartment life.
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.
We also love that the entire door can be removed for easy cleaning. The feature we liked the most was the oven’s roll-top opening which not only frees up counter space, but also gives the Easy Reach its name. hamilton beach mixer Most toaster ovens either swing open to the side, like a microwave, or swing down, like a conventional oven. This exposes more than two-thirds of the interior oven, much like an outdoor BBQ grill.
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.
We’d also prefer dial controls over the FlashXpress’s blister-push buttons, but they’re perfectly usable and not as glitchy or mushy as others we tested. As you might imagine, an appliance that heats all these foods is going to get dirty. Luckily, most models are as easy to clean out as a traditional toaster, if not easier. There’s generally a tray at the bottom that catches crumbs, melted cheese or other debris.
When the oven is operating, the glass door becomes excessively hot, reaching temperatures as high as 339.2°F. The Hamilton Beach is the only toaster oven we tested with a door handle that becomes very hot to the touch at a temperature of 146.8 °F. The oven is extremely quiet as it operates with a dBA reading of 50.4; we virtually couldn’t hear it when it was running. Toaster ovens by Hamilton Beach only take up a small amount of counter space and have a variety of uses. This countertop oven is available in several different variations. For example, some of these ovens have doors that roll back and open upward instead of downward, making it easier to take food in and out.
Corner to corner, no other oven was as consistent (aside from the exorbitantly priced Wolf Gourmet Countertop Oven). Similarly priced large toaster ovens (like ones from Breville and KitchenAid) concentrated heat in the center of the oven and had more significant fall-off of heat toward the edges. Additionally, as a Japanese appliance, the Panasonic FlashXpress is designed around degrees Celsius for temperature input.