With very few exceptions, the best device for toasting is a toaster, if that’s all you need it to do. Toaster ovens tend to do a whole lot more than toast and can handle a much broader array of foods.
Toasting is the process of very quickly and evenly heating and drying the exterior of a piece of bread at high temperature, leaving the exterior pleasantly browned and the interior perhaps less affected—ideally maybe even still a little moist and chewy, if you’re not charring the thing.
A classic toaster (see our guide to the Best Toasters) is well situated to do this, because it essentially consists of a pair of resistive heating elements that get very hot, very close to the bread. When the element reaches a prescribed temperature—and thus maybe brownness—the toast pops up. Most modern toasters also have a bagel setting that’ll brown one side more than the other.
The toaster ovens in this buying guide can toast bread, but they can also handle far more complicated tasks, like slow-roasting a chicken, broiling a tuna melt, baking bread or pizza, air frying wings, or charring vegetables on a griddle plate.
But because the heating elements are likely farther away from the bread, and the ovens are larger, a toaster oven might toast differently and a little less quickly than a single-purpose toaster. Which is to say, it might bake your bread a little in the process of toasting it. That said, a toaster oven can also better accommodate breads of varying thickness, as well as toast with stuff on it. Do you like garlic bread? Then you probably like toaster ovens.
And in fact, as it turned out, our favorite bread toaster among our toaster ovens can make simple dry toast that’ll shame most toasters. The Japanese-designed Balmuda the Toaster uses steam to keep bread lively, even as it gently browns its exterior.
