Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I've had the Avante Elite Toaster Oven for about 6 months now and have used it almost every day since I bought it. I originally bought it thinking I'd mainly use it for toast but after experimenting with different items I found that it can serve as a pretty adequate oven/stove top. I'm far from a gourmet chef so this review is from the perspective of someone who can follow a recipe to make a tasty treat but who has never broasted or flambayed and who doesn't yet know what parboiled means.
As a toaster: Just about excellent. It does the "Toast" function very well. Toast was just the right amount of crunchy. The "Toast" setting also adjusts its toasting time pretty accurately so that if the oven is still hot from having used it to cook something, it will set itself to toast for less time. However I have noticed that if I've used the oven on the "Broil" setting (which gets it VERY hot) I need to remove the items from the oven a little earlier than when it actually thinks it will be done. If I left them in there until the timer went off they wouldn't get burnt or even overly dark, just darker than I personally like. I've also made toasty sandwhiches with the Toast feature. I make my sandwhich on buns or french bread and stick them in the oven, set it to Toast, and they come out toasty and melty like you would get at Quiznos.
As an oven: Excellent. The oven part of the Avante Elite cooks meat thoroughly and fairly evenly. I've cooked chicken, beef, hot dogs, breaded eggplant patties, and frozen entrees. I've also baked pizzas and banana bread. All came out pretty delicious. I usually rotate the pizzas once during cooking because the back end of the oven tends to cook things faster than the front end. The oven itself is larger than it looks. I've been able to fit all the frozen pizzas I've tried (including the fairly large Digiorno pizzas).
As a stove top: Great! I don't know if the manufacturers intended for the top "warmer" to be used as a makeshift stove top but that's what I've used it for many many times. I set the oven to the "Broil" setting (caution, it gets the whole oven very hot, but that's the very reason I use this setting) and place a stove-top safe dish on top and then fry, boil, saute or cook *almost* as I would on a normal stove top. I've fried bacon (using the included baking sheet although the bacon can be cooked inside the oven with the included broil pan) and eggs, cooked spaghetti, sauteed vegetables and tofu and have even tried cooking corn and rice up there. The corn and rice are a bit harder because the water doesn't come to a fast boil as it would on a real stove top so unless you have a lot of time, the corn and rice will have to be cooked elsewhere. The top warmer also is somewhat warped (probably from all the extreme temperature changes it undergoes) and so I had to buy a tiny egg-frying pan (it's so cute! if I'm able to add my pictures to this page, you'll see it) so that the egg would cook evenly. That is, I tried to put the baking sheet down first and then fry the egg on that but the egg just slid to one corner of the sheet and I had to make scrambled eggs that day instead. Those came out pretty good though!
So if you want a great toaster that also does justice to the "oven" part of its name AND works great as a makeshift stove top, this toaster oven is worth the money.
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