The Best Toaster Oven Air Fryer Combos

The Element IQ system is why this oven bakes like a full-size one. Five quartz elements switch on and off independently, so heat goes where the food is instead of blasting from top and bottom the whole time. RTINGS measured a spread of about ±8°F across the interior at a 350°F setting, versus roughly ±22°F in an average budget toaster oven. You notice it on cookies. The back row doesn't scorch while the front row sits pale.

Toast is the boring test most countertop ovens quietly fail. This one doesn't. In Wirecutter's toast evenness testing it came out ahead of every other toaster oven, browning a full load of bread end to end. The rack holds nine slices, which matters on a weekend morning when you're feeding people in shifts. Good Housekeeping's lab found it hits 400°F in under five minutes, about half the wait of a standard oven.

The box measures 16 by 13.5 by 7 inches inside, so a 9-by-13 pan slides in, a 14-inch pizza fits, and a 5-quart Dutch oven clears the roof for slow cooking. A second, faster fan speed kicks in for air frying and dehydrating — you can dry four trays of apple slices at once. Serious Eats roasted a four-pound chicken in it to a safe 165°F with deeply browned, crackling skin and no added oil.

It's built to outlast the coating on a cheap oven. The interior is stainless rather than non-stick, and Wirecutter's durability work found stainless interiors on premium ovens showed no degradation after three years while budget coatings visibly broke down inside about 18 months. Owner feedback lines up. Plenty of people describe running this thing several times a day for two or three years, often after a previous Breville lasted a decade.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

It's big and heavy — 21.5 inches wide and about 30 pounds — so it isn't something you shuffle around, and it will crowd a small apartment counter. It's also the most expensive oven here apart from its own smart sibling.

It isn't bulletproof. A small but consistent thread in owner feedback describes preheat cycles that finish and then stall before the timer starts, and cracked quartz element sleeves on units that arrived damaged or were bought open-box. Most people never hit either problem, but it's worth buying new and checking the elements before your return window closes.

Thanksgiving is the easy sell here: this oven takes a 12-pound turkey. Day to day, the more useful trick is that two racks both cook. You can run a sheet pan of vegetables under a chicken, or bake two 12-inch pizzas at once, and the food on the lower rack doesn't come out sad and pale. If you cook for four or more, that's the difference between one round and two.

The surround convection is genuinely powerful, and you can taste it on fries. Ninja pushes air from more directions than a standard convection oven, at 1800 watts, and the payoff is crisp edges without a mid-cook shake. The air fry function uses up to 75% less fat than deep frying by Ninja's own testing against hand-cut fries. It also dehydrates, roasts, broils, toasts and does bagels — ten functions in total.

The controls are easier to live with than the spec sheet suggests. The handle itself is the display, and it lights up the rack positions you should use for whatever function you picked, which spares you the manual. Open the door mid-cook and the settings freeze so you can't nudge them by accident. Owners routinely describe handing this oven to a grandparent or a teenager without a tutorial.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The 90-second preheat claim is optimistic. The timer beeps at 90 seconds, but owner feedback consistently says the interior needs longer than that to actually reach temperature, so add a few minutes if you care about the first batch.

It's a jack of all trades. Some owners find the differences between air roast and bake muddy in practice, and a few report browning that's less consistent than a Breville's. The exterior also gets quite hot, and at roughly 20 inches wide and 33 pounds it needs real clearance from your cabinets.

Fewer parts means fewer things to fail. You get a temperature dial, a 60-minute timer with auto shutoff, a toast shade selector and a function knob. That's it. There's no screen to go dim and no app account to make. Owner feedback for this oven skews heavily toward people who wanted exactly that — a toaster and an air fryer in one box, with a stainless interior instead of non-stick.

Capacity is modest but honest: six slices of bread, a 12-inch pizza, a 4-pound chicken, or three pounds of wings. At 15.75 inches wide it tucks under most upper cabinets, which the Breville and the Ninja won't do comfortably. If you're in an apartment kitchen where counter space is the real constraint, this is the pick that fits.

Consumer Reports has ranked Cuisinart among the top two toaster oven brands overall, with Excellent scores for baking consistency across multi-rack tests. That's the reassuring part of buying the cheaper option here. You're not gambling on an unknown — you're giving up smart heating and preset accuracy, not basic competence.

The accessories are better than you'd expect at this level. It ships with an oven rack, a baking pan that doubles as a drip tray, a proper air fry basket, and a reversible ceramic non-stick grill and griddle plate. That last one turns the oven into a passable indoor grill for burgers, which is a nice thing to have in February.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The analog dial has no temperature readout, so you're trusting a printed scale. Owners report that the actual interior temperature doesn't always match the mark, and thicker cuts need a meat thermometer and a few extra minutes. Not a dealbreaker, but plan for it.

Cleaning is the common complaint. The interior wipes down easily enough, but grease works its way around the heating elements and into the corners, and the crumb tray doesn't pull clear as neatly as it should. The 60-minute timer cap also rules out long, slow roasts.

Underneath, this is the same Element IQ system as our top pick: five independent quartz elements, sensing and digital PID control, thirteen functions. So the fundamentals — even browning, no cold spots, real convection for air frying — carry over. What you're paying extra for is the software layer on top of that heat, not better heat.

Autopilot is the part that earns its keep. You pick a recipe in the app, hit start, and the oven walks itself through the stages — preheat, bake, then broil to finish — changing mode and temperature without you standing there. It's most useful for multi-step things you'd otherwise babysit. Breville+ backs it with over a thousand guided recipes from Serious Eats, America's Test Kitchen, NYT Cooking and others.

The app also quietly fixes small annoyances. It lets you preheat without starting the cook timer, and it exposes modes that aren't on the front panel. Owners who stuck with it for a month tend to describe the phone control as the reason they'd buy it again, while the ones who never opened the app mostly wish they'd bought the standard Pro.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

This is the priciest and heaviest oven here — nearly 39 pounds — and it's a two-person unboxing. It's also another account and another app in your kitchen, and a chunk of the value evaporates if you don't want that.

Quality control shows up in owner feedback more than we'd like for something this expensive. Reports of dented units, misaligned doors and early failures aren't rare. Breville's service has a decent reputation for making it right, but inspect yours carefully when it arrives.