Toaster ovens can come with functions, buttons, and settings that aren’t always clear. Trying to prepare a bagel or cook a small pizza can prove to be challenging. Thankfully, you can keep things simple with no more than 3 toaster oven settings you’ll find on pretty much any model.
Remember, the setting you choose is what controls to heating elements inside. Each preset or suggested cooking time will modify how a given food is prepared. Complicating things, a setting such as ‘cookie’ does not always know whether you’re preparing a small pan of mini-chocolate chip cookies or a larger sized one. How to best approach your toaster oven is use your best judgment and stick with these 3 basic settings.
Bake.
The ‘bake’ setting on a toaster oven is what you’ll use most. It’s similar to a traditional oven with heat coming from the bottom. Baking in a toaster oven usually involves it cycling or pulsing top and bottom elements, varying the intensity and helping to maintain an even temperature. After you’ve selected your temperature, preheat for 5 minutes before throwing in a pan of anything. Remember, things will usually bake faster in a toaster oven. Check on anything 5-10 minutes earlier than you normally would.
Broil.
Broil is like grilling. The heat comes from a single direction, usually from the top elements. For melting cheese, roasting peppers, making indoor s’mores, or heating up thin slices of vegetables, this is what you want. You generally won’t need to preheat your toaster oven on ‘boil’. You’ll want to use top rack placement and remember the heat’s only coming from one direction.
Toast.
Toaster ovens can make toast, although some do so better than others. The setting is relatively straightforward. The upper and lower elements will distribute heat, temperature is generally controlled either by the general ‘toast’ setting or manually, and rack position can be modified accordingly. The best results are usually found with the middle rack position. Toaster ovens fortunate to have ‘Light’, ‘Medium’, and ‘Dark’ settings can provide more guidance on where things need to be to make the perfect pair of toast.
Although the recipes might be a little different, generally, you can make almost anything in a toaster oven – at least, anything you can make in an oven. Roasted sweet potato rounds, sandwiches, and all sorts of fun. It can be overwhelming at first having to learn new recipe approaches but the differences are minimal between a large, traditional oven and a toaster oven. Purchase yours today at Living.ca.
