At right: my new Breville compact oven. At left and further forward so it looks bigger: my more-than-thirty-year-old Black and Decker Toast-R-Oven. Soon after I bought this now-antique appliance, Black and Decker sold their small appliance division to GE, so most people think of this model as a GE Toast-R-Oven. Amazon and Consumer Reports all love Breville ovens with all their features and complexity. However, in user reviews ordinary people often mention how much they would like to just replace their old GE. I would have done that too, but nobody makes a super-simple device with just an on-off switch and a dial for how dark you like your toast. So here we are.
My new oven at this moment is still in its preliminary heating cycle to remove noxious coatings from the heating elements, so I can't yet give any reaction. I must admit that the very fat user manual makes it sound like you need at least elementary programming skills to master the toast, bagel, pizza, cookie, broiling, and other settings within the Breville. Not to mention the "frozen" button and the "Farenheit-Celsius" button. I am brave and will soon be the master of all I survey, at least in my own kitchen.
BTW: the top heating element on the Toast-R-Oven stopped working or I would have kept it forever.
I'll be curious to hear how you like it!
ReplyDeleteDoes it have a chicken nuggets button? When we got our new stove in late 2012 I discovered that a fair number of people who had similar, but mostly higher-end stoves were trying to find tasteful ways to cover up that button so people wouldn't know they had it. I actually bought a big bag of chicken nuggets to see how it did. (It did fine, slightly better than the new microwave we got with a similar button.) One bag was enough, though.
ReplyDeleteI'm keeping my fingers crossed that my old toaster oven holds up longer than I do. :)
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