Counter Top Oven

Baking, Minus the Oven

When my husband and I moved into our beautiful Santa Cruz rental we made a major sacrifice. We gave up our baking privileges, as our new place did not have an oven.

Moving into an apartment that lacks common amenities isn’t rare when you live in some parts of the country. Many folks in New York City, for example, don’t have either an oven or range, cooking up meals on hot plates instead. In Los Angeles, you’ll be hard pressed to find a rental that comes with a refrigerator. In Santa Cruz, not having an oven raises eyebrows and unfortunately my partner is a baker with a serious itch to get cracking on the Bon Appétit Desserts cookbook I gave him over the holidays (cruel, I know). With that in mind I started to look into alternative ways to heat things up in the kitchen.

Surprisingly, standalone ovens in the United States just don’t exist. If you want an oven minus the range, your only real option is to buy a unit that needs to be installed within a cabinet. Since carpentry isn’t our thing, I looked into a rather new kitchen category, the countertop oven. As folks began to use their toaster ovens to do more than just make toast, companies took note and developed miniature ovens to accommodate their customers heating needs.

“A certain amount of this is spin,” says Lisa McManus, senior editor at Cook’s Illustrated. Ms.  McManus recently tested 10 oven models for the publication. “ It’s still a toaster oven, they’ve just made some bigger.” Well, and added features including the ability to bake (some advertise a convection option), broil, rotisserie a chicken, and even ridiculous things like dehydrate food.

Unfortunately, the more a countertop oven can do doesn’t mean the better it is. In most cases, each model does one or two things well, but misses the mark with other features.

I noticed this problem when testing a few models here at home. Hamilton Beach’s Set & Forget ($120), for example, was surprisingly good at baking (we made a deliciously moist carrot cake, roasted cauliflower with sage and garlic, and baked an eggplant to perfection), but it failed at broiling. It took me three times the normal time to darken the skins on some Roma tomatoes.

The other issue is that these appliances are small, and their diminutive size proves challenging when it comes to evenly cooking dishes, using existing pans and sheets, and preparing a meal for more than one person.

When baking homemade sourdough in the Waring Pro Professional Convection Oven ($400), for example, loaves that were further back on the rack almost burnt while those in the front had only begun to turn golden. A similar problem occurred when my husband baked a pumpkin cheesecake in a three-inch deep cake pan, only in this case the top of the cake browned before the rest of the batter fully cooked. The cause: heating elements that are just too close to your pans.

The Challenges of Countertop Ovens - NYTimes.com

When my husband and I moved into our beautiful Santa Cruz rental we made a major sacrifice. We gave up our baking privileges, as our new place did not have an oven.

Moving into an apartment that lacks common amenities isn’t rare when you live in some parts of the country. Many folks in New York City, for example, don’t have either an oven or range, cooking up meals on hot plates instead. In Los Angeles, you’ll be hard pressed to find a rental that comes with a refrigerator. In Santa Cruz, not having an oven raises eyebrows and unfortunately my partner is a baker with a serious itch to get cracking on the Bon Appétit Desserts cookbook I gave him over the holidays (cruel, I know). With that in mind I started to look into alternative ways to heat things up in the kitchen.

Surprisingly, standalone ovens in the United States just don’t exist. If you want an oven minus the range, your only real option is to buy a unit that needs to be installed within a cabinet. Since carpentry isn’t our thing, I looked into a rather new kitchen category, the countertop oven. As folks began to use their toaster ovens to do more than just make toast, companies took note and developed miniature ovens to accommodate their customers heating needs.

“A certain amount of this is spin,” says Lisa McManus, senior editor at Cook’s Illustrated. Ms.  McManus recently tested 10 oven models for the publication. “ It’s still a toaster oven, they’ve just made some bigger.” Well, and added features including the ability to bake (some advertise a convection option), broil, rotisserie a chicken, and even ridiculous things like dehydrate food.

Unfortunately, the more a countertop oven can do doesn’t mean the better it is. In most cases, each model does one or two things well, but misses the mark with other features.

I noticed this problem when testing a few models here at home. Hamilton Beach’s Set & Forget ($120), for example, was surprisingly good at baking (we made a deliciously moist carrot cake, roasted cauliflower with sage and garlic, and baked an eggplant to perfection), but it failed at broiling. It took me three times the normal time to darken the skins on some Roma tomatoes.

The other issue is that these appliances are small, and their diminutive size proves challenging when it comes to evenly cooking dishes, using existing pans and sheets, and preparing a meal for more than one person.

When baking homemade sourdough in the Waring Pro Professional Convection Oven ($400), for example, loaves that were further back on the rack almost burnt while those in the front had only begun to turn golden. A similar problem occurred when my husband baked a pumpkin cheesecake in a three-inch deep cake pan, only in this case the top of the cake browned before the rest of the batter fully cooked. The cause: heating elements that are just too close to your pans.

Cooking green, reducing your carbon footprint in the kitchen : the new green basics way

ITC publication

Working woman

Knack Universal Design, A Step-by-Step Guide to Modifying Your Home for Comfortable, Accessible Living

Mealtime manual for people with disabilities and the aging