What Can You Cook in a Toaster Oven?

The short answer

A countertop oven is a small oven. It bakes, roasts, broils and toasts, and with a fan it crisps — so the real question is never what but how much. The ceiling is the pan, and across every brand in this catalog the biggest pan any manufacturer will commit to in writing is a 9 x 13 inch quarter-sheet. If what you want to cook fits on that, a countertop oven will cook it. If it does not, no preset changes the answer.

We are not going to publish cooking times for foods we have not cooked. What we can publish is what the manufacturers publish: the names of the functions they put on the dial, and the objects they state will fit. The conversion arithmetic for adapting a full-size recipe is here, using only the three brands' own published temperature ranges.

What the makers say fits

Two things jump out of that table. The first is that the useful claims are stated as objectsrather than volumes — a pan, a pizza, a bird — because an object is something you can hold up against your own kitchen and a liter figure is not. The second is that the ceiling is remarkably consistent: a 9 x 13 pan and a 12 to 13 inch pizza, from a fifty-dollar oven to a four-hundred-dollar one. The full pan-fit guide works through the dimensions.

What the function names actually mean

A twelve-in-one oven does not do twelve things. It has twelve labelled combinations of element, fan speed and set point, and most households use four. Sorted by what the hardware is really doing:

Radiant jobs (no fan needed). Toast, bagel, broil, melt. These work by direct infrared heat from the elements onto the food surface, which is why a fanless oven toasts perfectly well and a Panasonic with infrared heaters front and back does it fast. The toast-specific ranking is here.

Convection jobs (the fan earns its keep). Bake, roast, air fry, reheat pizza. Moving air strips the insulating boundary layer off the food, which browns and crisps faster at the same set point. Why “air fry” and “convection” are frequently the same elements.

Low-and-slow jobs (only if the floor is published low enough). Proof, dehydrate, slow cook, keep warm. These need the oven to hold a low set point for a long time, and most ovens in this catalog publish neither a low floor nor a long timer. The standard Our Place Wonder Oven is the clean example: its published floor is 200°F and its timer stops at 60 minutes, so no label on the dial could make it proof or dry. Which ovens can actually dehydrate, from their published floors.

Mechanical additions (real hardware). Rotisserie and a temperature probe are the two features in this category that are not a relabelled fan setting. A rotisserie spit turns; a probe measures. Everything else on a twelve-function dial is elements and air.

What a countertop oven cannot do

Anything bigger than a quarter-sheet. Nothing here publishes a half-sheet fit, and a half-sheet is what most scaled recipes assume. That is the constraint we worked through for home bakeries.

A large bird.Two makers publish a turkey weight — 14 pounds from Breville, 12 from SharkNinja — and nothing publishes more. The turkey page is here.

High-ceiling pizza, on several models. Published ceilings in this catalog run from 445°F to 500°F, and the gap is real for thin crust. The Instant Omni Plus tops out at a published 450°F; the Panasonic and the Nuwave publish 500°F.

Replace the oven in the wall, for most households. We answered that one in full, and the honest version is: for single-tray everyday cooking, yes and it is cheaper to run; for big batches, large items and delicate bakes that dislike a fan, no.