After testing, we washed all of the fryer components to see how easy they were to clean. For our original guide in 2017, we ran the air fryers through a series of tests, cooking frozen and cuisinart air fryer oven hand-cut french fries, frozen finger foods, and pork chops. In subsequent years of testing, we cooked frozen french fries, chicken tenders, and fish sticks, as well as fresh chicken wings.
I set the Ninja to a slightly lower temp per its manual and in eight minutes had perfect fries (a very close second place and it likely would have won or tied if I’d set it to 450 F). KitchenAid also took eight minutes on 450 F, while the Crux took nine minutes to get there and the Calphalon took 12. The Cuisinart was actually the fastest at just three minutes, but it burnt the edges of the fries and didn’t cook evenly. At this point, I began to suspect the Cuisinart has an unusually intense air fryer function, for better or worse.
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 and decided to split it between six paper muffin cases which I placed on the baking tray. The bagel was nicely browned in around four minutes, which is slightly longer than the 2-3 minutes that it might usually take in one of the best toasters.
The Cuisinart Digital AirFryer Toaster Oven is more than just an air fryer and toaster—you will end up using it every day for roasting, baking, dehydrating, reheating, and more. Since this is a relatively new cuisinart choppers category of appliances, the manual is critical in getting started. We checked to see if each explained how to use the product thoroughly, provided guidelines for cooking specific foods, and included recipes.
Seven functions let you air fry, bake, broil, warm, toast, convection bake and convection broil, offering extra versatility. A 60 minute timer, auto shut off and toast shade selector lend added convenience. And the stainless steel construction ensures long-lasting use and durability. An air fryer’s heating elements are usually on the top of the unit along with a large fan, and it cuts down cook time significantly. You also don’t need to preheat with this air fryer which, when you’ve been working all day and need things to be quick and easy, is huge.
Similarly, the breading on the chicken nuggets was pale and crumbly in comparison to the batches that the Philips Premium Airfryer produced. But we’ve found that most pod-shaped air fryers struggle to cook food evenly due to their cramped cooking baskets. For the price—and the nice user interface—we still think the Pro LE is a good option. On the flip side, one of the biggest pitfalls of pod-shaped air fryers is that their compact size really limits not only the amount of food you can cook at once but also the kind of food you can cook. Air fryers can’t fit larger items like casseroles, whole pizzas, or whole chickens. Because their fans are so powerful and the interior is so cramped, they tend to cook unevenly, and they aren’t good for recipes that need a more delicate touch, such as cakes.
If you really want a toaster oven, though, that doubles as an air fryer, the Cuisinart is a contender that we found worthy of its price tag. Though the Philips Air Fryer is the smallest air fryer in our test, its capacity for wings and fries exceeds the larger-sized Cuisinart and almost matches the massive Breville. The Avance XL Air Fryer can fit around 26 chicken wings in the basket. You could fill the bottom with 43 oz of french fries, perfect for 3 – 4 servings.
In another life, I rustled pots and pans as a professional chef in New York City restaurants. While I can crank out a huge holiday meal with the best of them, these days I’m mostly making family meals that involve the toaster oven, and increasingly the air fryer. The oven is beautifully designed with intuitive, easy-to-read electronic controls. The preprogrammed times and temperatures cover many functions and types of food.
There have been user reports of the US model becoming exceptionally hot during use, perhaps due to its stainless steel exterior, but the UK model didn’t suffer the same issues. As mentioned above, the Cuisinart TOA-60 Air Fryer Toaster Oven is known in the UK as the Cuisinart Air Fryer Mini Oven; and at the time of writing, this appliance wasn’t available in Australia. We tested the UK version for this review, and it’s worth noting that there are slight differences between models. cuisinart toaster costco Our version arrived in matte black, while the US model is clad in stainless steel, plus the dial labeling is slightly different. On test, we were impressed by all of the cooking settings we tried – the huge caveat being that cooking times and the temperature will likely need adjusting to achieve the best results. For non-meat dishes, we needed to set the temperature to about 25°F lower (roughly 10°C) than the recipe or Cuisinart’s own information booklet recommended.
But even if you decide to set the machine manually, you can still press the “shake” button to activate the reminder. The beeping is much louder on the Cosori Pro LE than on the Premium Airfryer, and you have no way to lower the volume or turn it off, so some people may find the sound annoying. That said, the beeping is loud enough to be heard from far away, which is handy if you’re in another room.