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Kitchen and coffee

Breville toaster oven

5owners with an opinion
40%of verdicts positive
1/3positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and ease of use; criticized for reliability.

What people wrote

Doesn’t like it
I think that, for reasons that are various but ultimately just different flavors of the same reason, this seems to be the case for high end anything . My 14 year old Kia Soul isn't in the shop nearly as often as any of the much younger midrange and high-end cars my friends typically drive. My $75 bottom-of-the-line Seiko 5 wristwatch doesn't need nearly as much maintenance as my old boss's Rolex or my dad's Breitling. (And a $5 quartz watch would require still less maintenance and keep better time too.) Our fancy Breville toaster oven seems to be reflowing the solder in its own circuit boards, and my parents' fancy Bosch laundry machines need to be replaced every 5 years, while our cheapo unit works fine and is older than some of my colleagues at work. I'm guessing it's just that trying to pack more fancy features into a product means there's more to break. Or, e.g., if you've got a higher-end laptop then it might have higher-performance parts that generate more heat and degrade the plastic more quickly. Or they might have tried to distinguish themselves by using materials that aren't typically used for a reason. Stainless steel cars, anyone?
Likes it
Sorry for the late reply but been out of town and not checking. Those are toasters, not toaster ovens. A toaster toasts bread (and waffles, or other thin flour things). That's it. A toaster oven began as a category of device that looked like a tiny oven but was built to be a toaster that could do a little bit more than just toast bread. But it's evolved, and modern toaster ovens can take a quarter-sheet pan (it's based on US standard, so it's 13"x9", but more or less the same size is used worldwide in commercial kitchens), sometimes a little larger. I have never owned a Breville toaster. I have owned three of their toaster ovens, two of which I've given to friends and family when I moved up in size. I don't turn my main oven on, at all, except for holidays, because the toaster oven heats up and finishes cooking the food before the big oven even gets up to temperature. And I live in the southern US, so extra heat in the kitchen is usually heat that the air conditioner has to remove - it very rarely is helping me keep warm (think AGA ranges - those would never work here). I wait for the sub-freezing nights, of which we usually have 20-30 a year at most (no kidding), to run the self-clean cycle on the big oven.
Doesn’t like it
Ehhhhh. I got one of the fancy Breville toaster ovens because the (gas) oven in my apartment was so janky. If that's best in class, I'd hate to see the competition. The controls take 1–2 seconds to wake up, it makes the most horrendous beeping noises, the convection fan causes some funky resonance occasionally, the nonstick coating means you have to be careful cleaning it, the preheat timer is overly optimistic, the door spring is way too strong, etc, etc. It works but I definitely don't love it, and I'm left wondering how hard it would've really been to remedy most of the annoyances. For the price (and given the reviews) I was definitely expecting better.
Doesn’t like it
Making a cheap toaster for the masses is a difficult business today. Making a luxury product for a smaller audience is still feasible. I have a $300 Balmuda toaster that is honestly very good (it’s a steam oven). Previously I had a Breville toaster oven that was big enough to handle 80% of my oven tasks, but didn’t toast bread all that well. Tovala and Joule make fancy toaster ovens.
Likes it
I disagree. I bought an air fryer for my mom about five years ago, had an older breville toaster oven without the air fry capability I used for the better part of a decade, and moved to a new breville toaster oven with air fry capability about a year ago. The basket-design air fryers are a pain to store, don't have much space for food (we had to do fries in annoyingly small batches), and felt very one-note. By comparison, the new breville I have does everything the old one did plus air frying, and the difference is distinct - I tried making fries in the convection baking mode on the old one and the result was noticeably worse than what I get from the new one in air fry mode. Noise and heat output approaches annoying levels with either air fryer, so I'm pretty confident the experience I get is close or the same as the purpose-build one. And the ability to space things out more gives better results, at least for my purposes. (I'll note that 95% of my air fryer use is for fries.)