Cuisinart TOB-40 Custom Classic Toaster Oven Broiler reviews
Six reviews of the Cuisinart TOB-40 Custom Classic Toaster Oven Broiler
1、Finally a Toaster Oven that Toasts! This one is exactly what I needed and such an improvement from the last one I bought, a GE Rotisserie Convection Oven Model 169220 17, that lasted about 2 years before the top element caught fire!
I always do quite a bit of research before purchasing an item, focusing mainly on the customer reviews. Thank you to all who took the time to write a review.
The Cuisinart TOB-40 Classic Toaster Oven Broiler was very well rated and the sale price made it a great deal.
What I Love -
- TheCompact size; it fits perfectly below the upper cabinets, leaving enough space to prevent
overheating; and it has a nice contemporary look.
- Ease of use. There are three dials:
o Function dial, which offers you a choice of Toast, Bagel, Bake, or Broil
o Temperature Dial for the Baking and Broiling functions;
o Toast Shade Dial ranging from Light – Medium – Dark.
- It heats up quickly, no preheating, and my toast is nicely browned on both sides.
- The door has a solid plastic handle that stays cool to the touch.
- The shelf slides out when you open the door, and is held securely in place so it won’t fall out when
you slide it forward. My previous oven had neither of this features.
- The crumb tray is very accessible and slides out easily. It too has a nice solid plastic handle
.
- The Instruction Manual and Recipe Booklet provided by Cuisinart is also easy to use. The Recipe booklet is on
one side and when you flip the booklet over and you have the Instruction Booklet.
I found a delicious recipe for rich and dense Bittersweet Espresso Brownies!!
Making toast is simple and it comes out nicely browned on both sides!
- Set function dial to Toast (dial remains set to this until you change it)
- Choose Toast shade
- Push start. The oven beeps 5 times to let you know when it’s done.
I made baked potatoes the other day (after nuking them till about 1/2 done before tossing them into the Toaster oven) and they came out well.
The only thing I would change is the font.
It’s black on stainless steel (not a great deal of contrast), and rather small, making it a little difficult for my not so young eyes to read. I frequently find myself breaking out the magnifying glass to read directions or labels.
Seems to me, with the Baby Boomers starting to get to the age when vision is not what it used, that this would be an important design consideration.
However, since I plan on using this for making toast, Tuna Melts, and reheating my homemade pizza, I won’t be changing the settings much except for making baked potatoes during the summer months.
Bottom Line, I love this Toaster Oven and would Recommend it to anyone.
2、I see that some people have given this oven only 1 or 2 stars simply because it doesn’t have a timer. Personally, I’m glad it doesn’t have one. The toaster has a dial to set the darkness of the toast, just like on a regular toaster, and a button to start or stop the toaster, just like the lever on a regular toaster. It stops automatically when the toast is ready, just like a regular toaster. And it beeps (wish it didn’t – who needs that noise early in the morning when other people might be sleeping?).
We’ve gone through SO many toaster ovens in the past 20 years. They are so unreliable, but perhaps it’s because we use them constantly for broiling, toasting and reheating. My mother has had a toaster oven for about 35 years with no problems. The last toaster oven WE had was also a Cuisinart Classic, and it just broke a week ago. But it was the best toaster oven we’d had in recent years and it lasted quite awhile, so I was happy to see that this newer model is very similar. Not a lot of bells and whistles, no pesky timer that requires you to guess how long your food might take to cook and then turn it on again if the food isn’t ready yet, or force it off (some are so strangely hard to turn, you feel like you’re breaking them when you want to turn them off) if the food is done before the timer goes off.
We are still getting used to the slight differences between this one and the old one, but I just used it to broil some salmon and it turned out well.
Normally, I feel irritated when people write a review after barely using a product, but the one- and two-star reviews bugged me, so I decided to jump in. This is more of a rant against that than a helpful review. If this oven proves unreliable over time, I shall update.
3、I need to replace an old Toastmaster toaster oven. The toaster was super-simple: Set the desired toast darkness, and press a lever to start toasting. After almost 20 years, it died. I thought it would be easy to find a replacement for it, but to my surprise, they don’t make toaster ovens that simple these days.
My main requirement for needing a toaster oven as opposed to a vertical loading toaster was that I like to make toasted open-face sandwiches. Unfortunately, most of the toaster ovens that I saw while researching had several problems:
1) They required you to turn a dial to set the darkness each time.
2) The amount of space between light and dark was minimal, so getting it the way you want each time would be no easy task.
3) An annoying ticking sound.
Finally I came across this Cuisinart TOB-40, and this was the toaster for me. It was exactly what I needed in a toaster oven. It solves those 3 problems: You can set it and forget it. Adjustments to toast darkness are easy because there is a dial dedicated to setting it. There is an on/off button and *no ticking*. It also has the bonus of the rack that extends automatically when the door is opened.
If you’re like me and need something that’s more of a toaster than an oven, but is suitable for making open-faced sandwiches and for toasting larger items such as muffins, I’d highly recommend this one.
4、Do much research and you find that almost every toaster oven has serious flaws of quality, function and/or performance. Indeed, this one seems to be the only Cuisinart toaster that pulls the toaster tray out (when the tray is used in the upper or toaster slot). It toasts quickly and evenly and heats/cooks nicely. Only flaw is the small lettering and numbers indicating functions and temps. But you get used to it, something other seems to adjust to. Some other toaster ovens might also be good but the overall size was critical here as we did not have several acres of counter space to accommodate larger and perhaps equally good toaster ovens.
Measuring in advance is a smart move to be sure it fits your available space. That’s it.
5、I bought this unit to replace an old B&D that had just burned out. I like the simple settings and the fact that you can leave the toast setting exactly where you like it and not have to reset it every time with a timer or series of buttons. I don’t use it to make souffles. I use it to make toast and to bake/reheat stuff, so it has what I need. Preliminary results:
Bagel setting: Top elements glow much brighter than lower elements so that the top comes out crisp and browned while the bottom comes out less crispy. “Light” setting sufficient.
Toast setting: Both elements glow equally. Perfect toast. Again, the “light” setting was perfect for me, so do yourself a favor and start on “light” the first time you try it.
When placed in the correct position for toasting, the rack slides out when you open the door for easy toast retrieval. The crumb tray is accessible from the front of the unit — I might actually remove crumbs from this toaster oven! Whether or not it can handle 6 slices of toast depends on the size of your bread. The toast rack measures about 11″ x 11″ so go measure your bread if that is critical for you. The only thing that I miss about my old toaster is that when the door was opened, the toaster stopped. To stop toast on this one, you need to press the little button, which is slightly harder to find than the door handle when you’ve entered the wrong toast setting and are in a panic. So far, so good otherwise. Seems like a solid appliance.
6、This toaster oven looks good and seems solid, and it makes toast and bakes nicely. But the first time I used it to bake parboiled artichokes, they tasted so awful that I almost couldn’t eat them. I thought they tasted strongly of pepper, and yet there was no pepper on them. I thought it might be that the artichokes themselves were bitter or had pesticides on them. Then I tried roasting organic potatoes in them, and there was the same peppery taste, which I started to realize wasn’t really pepper but more of a chemical taste. The third try was with reheating pizza. This time I could really smell the chemical fumes coming from the oven as it was preheating, and the pizza again had a chemical taste. At first I thought it was the nonstick tray that was emitting the fumes, then I realized that the interior or the oven has this same coating. To be fair, I am not used to cooking with teflon and I don’t even use a microwave, so I may be extra-sensitive to the fumes. Also, as far as I can tell, EVERY toaster oven on the market now has this nonstick coating. I’ve now read more about toaster ovens and it seems that the smell “burns off” after a few uses, so maybe it would have burned off. Or maybe I was letting it get too hot (I was baking at 400 degrees), as the fumes apparently are only released at high heat. But I’ve never smelled or tasted anything like that before with an appliance.
Update: After much research I realized that I’m not going to find a teflon-free toaster oven, except for the Waring Pro which oddly enough has more complaints about fumes than others, so I decided to keep this one. The fumes are the only thing I don’t like about it, and all the other toaster ovens have similar coatings. But I do really hate the smell.
