8 Best Toaster Ovens (2025), Tested and Reviewed
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Look, I can’t help but want the shiniest and biggest and most feature-filled among Breville’s many lovely ovens: That’s the Joule. But if I mention this to friends, they often point to the $500 price tag and shrug. The Smart Oven Pro is the Breville I then recommend instead: about half the price and three-quarters the benefit. This smaller-footprint oven offers Breville’s even cooking and precise thermostat across the standard array of baking, broiling, and toasting but with a slightly less juiced-up convection oven.
This oven’s size hits the sweet spot for smaller kitchens. It’s just big enough to fit a 13-inch pizza pan, a 12-by-12-inch square pan, or a 5-quart Staub Dutch. This last will let you make full use of this Breville’s useful slow-cook feature, which puts chili, stew, and Bolognese within reach during the summer without heating up the whole house. That said, there’s no air fryer or corresponding basket. And though the air fryer on a Breville oven is usually its least interesting feature, I found that french fries crisp up faster and easier on the Joule or the more expensive Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro ($400).
Was it the jets of steam? The top and bottom oven elements that alternate on and off, as if having a polite conversation? The “Ta-Da!” noise it makes when it’s done? Or just the beautifully browned toast that still maintained its moisture, pillowy on the inside and just barely crisped on the exterior? This Balmuda is the toaster oven that WIRED contributing writer Joe Ray fell in love with, even before it was broadly available in the United States (8/10, WIRED Recommends.)
It’s now quite gettable, and it inspires similar devotion from a new generation of customers for its unique facility with toasted bread: moist, pillowy, crisp, gently browned but not relieved of its character, batch after batch after batch. The Balmuda also offers separate settings for pizza bread (hotter on the top element), different styles of bread croissants (high heat blast at the end), and a traditional baking mode. But perhaps alone among toaster ovens, it’s the toast that makes the Balmuda special.
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