Air fryers are great, allowing you to enjoy crispy fried food without the usual grease of deep-fried cooking. Problem is, they just take up way too much counter space for what’s, essentially, a one-trick pony. Fortunately, these dedicated small appliances aren’t the only option for making low-grease fried grub, with air fryer toaster ovens now offering, pretty much, the same thing.
While convection toaster ovens have always been capable of cooking the same things air fryers do, they’ve traditionally been much slower at it. This new generation of toaster ovens, though, bring much more powerful fans that allow it to match the speedy performance of air fryers, allowing it to produce the same crispy fried results without the long wait. On top of air frying food at a quick pace, these air fryer toaster ovens can cook all other food traditional convection ovens do, making it a much more versatile option, whether you mount it up a wall or set it down on the kitchen counter.
These are the best air fryer toaster ovens.
Hamilton Beach Sure-Crisp Air Fry Toaster Oven
If you’re looking for any kind of affordable small kitchen appliance, Hamilton Beach usually has something that’s right on the budget. Their air fryer toaster oven, for instance, combines an economical price with excellent air frying, toasting, baking and broiling functions, giving you a capable appliance at a fraction of the cost of other brands. Granted, it’s not the sleekest. Heck, the large plastic knob controls feel very old-school, in fact. However, it does get the job done, as it’s able to cook a 12-inch pizza, toast six slices of toast, and even broil a 5-pound chicken. Truth be told, we were expecting the air frying function to be less than stellar, but it surprisingly keeps up with other ovens in the list.
Ninja Foodi SP101 Digital Air Fry Countertop Oven
This oven is much shorter than your standard toaster oven, coming in at just 7.6 inches tall. While that means you won’t be roasting an entire chicken in there, the abridged capacity does allow it to heat up the cooking area much faster, which makes it ideal for air frying while preheating faster than anything in the list. Plus, you can still fit a 13 x 13 sheet pan in there, so there’s still a lot of things you can cook on the oven. Just make sure to wear gloves when working on this thing as that low height means there’s a much bigger chance you’re going to touch a hot surface when moving food in and out. The oven has a unique design that mounts it on a hinged platform, allowing you to flip the whole thing up and push it against the wall when not in use, which allows it to take up very little room. It has eight cooking settings, namely air fry, roast, broil, bake, bagel, toast, dehydrate, and keep warm. The oven has impressive heat control, allowing you to cook everything quickly and evenly.
Instant Omni Plus 19Qt Air Fryer Toaster Oven
Yes, the guys that made the Instant Pot also have an air fryer toaster oven. Designed for versatile cooking, it has individual settings for air fry, toast, broil, bake, roast, rotisserie, dehydrate, reheat, warm, and convection, allowing you to use it for a whole load of meals. It is, however, pretty big, with a lot of extra height (it fits a large fan and a bigger heating element at the top), so it might be difficult to fit in a cabinet or shelf if you plan to set it up in there. The bigger size, however, allows you to fit two racks of food in one go, while a single metal knob top center allows you to dial-in the setting using a single control. We love the consistent cooking, as well as the even heat distribution that cooks everything from toast slices and chicken wings to big slabs of meat evenly.
Cuisinart TOA-65 Digital AirFryer Toaster Oven
We love the preprogrammed settings on this oven, as it takes out a lot of the experimenting you’ll normally do when cooking different types of food on a single appliance. When air frying, for instance, you can specify fries, wings, chicken nuggets, and other preset food items, which should make using the appliance just that much easier. Like other ovens in this list, it’s a pretty versatile appliance, with individual settings for air fry, bake, broil, toast, bagel, pizza, roast, dehydrating, proof, low heat, dual cook, reheat, and warm. We especially love the “dual cook” function, which, basically, lets you apply two cooking settings to one dish. That means, you can have it bake a chicken for a certain time, then finish things off with a couple minutes of roasting to caramelize the skin. It’s a real time-saver, while allowing for plenty of versatility in your cooking. Similar to the Instant oven above, though, this is pretty tall, so it might not be a good match, depending on how much headroom you have on where you plan to put it.
Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro
This versatile appliance comes with 11 settings, namely air fry, toast, bagel, broil, bake, cookies, roast, pizza, slow cook, reheat, and keep warm, so you can do everything from baking and roasting to air frying and even reheating last night’s leftovers. Even better, it cooks very evenly, courtesy of its five independent heating elements that allow it to deliver heat exactly where it’s needed, with built-in sensors automatically detecting cold spots and triggering the corresponding heating elements. It also has two speed settings for the fan, with the high speed blasting the powerful streams required to air fry food effectively and the lower speed allowing for more delicate cooking tasks. The cooking chamber measures 18.9 x 16.5 x 10.9 inches (width x depth x height), so there’s plenty of room inside, allowing you to roast an entire chicken or even slow cook a 4.4-quart Dutch oven.
