It also toasted bread evenly and made a gorgeously browned cake and level cake. The control panel is simple to operate with easy-to-read settings. In the Good Housekeeping Institute Kitchen Appliances and Innovation Lab, we’ve tested more than 20 different air fryer toaster ovens in addition to more than 40 standalone air fryers and 40 standalone toaster ovens. The Cuisinart toaster-oven air fryer suits any busy home cook who wants to air-fry delicious foods but would like the convenience of a multifunctional product. Not only does the Cuisinart make air-fryer favorites, such as french fries and wings, but it can also serve as a toaster, oven, microwave, and more.
The recipe makes six muffins and as such advises using a six cup muffin tin. But by this point I had all the ingredients out and my heart was set on blueberry muffins. So I mixed up the batter anyway cuisinart choppers and decided to split it between six paper muffin cases which I placed on the baking tray. I also tried air frying frozen breaded fish fillets which is usually my preferred way of cooking these.
I looked around online and through our own list of the best air fryers, and asked my friends online if they had recommendations about air fryers they own and love. While our testing standards are impeccable at Tom’s Guide, I love the added seal of approval known as “someone I know swears by this.” I’ve been going through the laborious steps of making “oven-fried” chicken wings. It starts with a 24-hour process that takes up a whole rack in your fridge, and that’s before you even turn the oven on. All the while I saw countless people online enjoying crispy air-fried wings with a low-effort process.
The printed directions on the oven door are handy for determining the rack placement for each setting, so you don’t have to refer to the user manual. I used two bone-in and skin-on chicken breasts — seasoned only with salt — to try out the roasting function. To achieve success the meat should be tender with an internal temperature of 165 degrees F and the skin golden and crispy within 40 minutes.
The air fryer basket needs a good soaking to clean it, but the baking dish has a nonstick coating. The oven also comes with an excellent cookbook to get you started on air frying. When the timer went off, the fries were still a bit hard inside and the tops were way more brown than the bottoms, so I turned them and put them back in for an extra five minutes. The finished fries were quite well browned and though they were cooked through, they didn’t have the fluffy centers and crispy outsides that I‘ve come to expect from fries cooked in an air fryer, I was disappointed.
When toasting bread, two slices took a little over four minutes, I didn’t turn them during toasting and although crisped on both sides, the top was much better browned than the underside. So if you’re particular about both sides being the same color, you’ll probably need to turn the bread over mid-way through. The temperature dial is marked in 50° increments without dots in-between, so it’s not easy to be very accurate when setting the temperature. Furthermore, turning the timer dial on is how each cooking function is switched on, and though it’s a good safety feature that it automatically switches off when the timer runs out.
Helen McCue is a freelance contributor who trained as a home economist. I made the pizza directly on the baking tray, making sure it was well oiled, pushing the dough right up to the edges of the tray. The pizza was cooked in just eight minutes, with a light and airy base, crisp crust, and golden cheese. As directed, I preheated the oven for five minutes on the bake function, then put the muffins in and set the timer for 20 minutes.
It has to be set inside of a baking tray but has no way to attach to the tray; this makes shaking around foods mid-cook (a requirement for many recipes) quite difficult. You also need to put the rack quite high in the oven when using the air fry function, which when combined with the basket/tray combo, leaves very little room for maneuvering. This Cuisinart TOA-60 Air Fryer Toaster Oven offers seven functions, including air frying, cuisinart toa60 broiling, toasting and oven cooking. Made to rival even the best toaster ovens, this is pretty impressive considering its neat compact size, a feature that makes it ideal if you’ve got a small kitchen. But for households with a lot of mouths to feed, the capacity will probably not be enough for the number of portions you’ll want to cook. In our tests, the Ninja Foodi Air Fry Oven air fried crispy, evenly cooked wings and fries.
The air fryer toaster oven comes with a metal mesh basket for air frying, a broil rack and a baking tray. It has a 30-minute timer, a stay-on setting so you can cook food for longer than 30 minutes or set your own timer and auto-shutoff. Take note that it’s a little tricky to set an exact timer because the time increments are in denoted in units of five, so there are no specific markings for the individual minutes.
When I’m not reporting on everything from wire whisks to high-tech ranges and refrigerators, you can find me cooking in my own kitchen. The size means it’s ideal for 1-2 person households, and if you often heat up a whole oven just for small portions, using this instead will definitely save time as well as energy and therefore money too. On the underside, the base was very crisp around the edges of the pan where most of the oil had settled, but that said, it wasn’t soft or soggy in the middle, just lightly crisped. There is a pizza stone accessory you can purchase separately if you intend to make a lot of pizzas and want a better result. All in all though, this was a delicious pizza and I was very happy with the result.