A must have appliance

Author's Rating:

Pros: Accurate temperature control

Cons: Front glass gets and stays smoky/dirty

The Bottom Line: 
Overall I highly recommend this to anyone that spends time cooking. With its superior design and functionality you can’t go wrong.

Author's Review
I purchased this model about 4 months ago and in that time I have developed a strong attachment to it. Let me list the features I use the most.

- Toasting bread and bagels. This appliance is the BEST toaster I have ever owned period! The toast is evenly cooked and in 9 out of 10 cases it toasts it in a single cycle. Every previous toaster and toaster oven I have ever used almost always required multiple cycles. It can handle 4 slices of bread without a problem.
- Convection baking is super fast and again even without burning. I cook chicken and fish, frozen french fries, small beef roasts, pork roasts, you name it and it cooks quickly giving everything a beautiful even brown color. I make my own roasted whole chickens in this and not only does it save a ton of money over buying them already cooked in the supermarket, but it tastes great and a 5 pound chicken takes me less than an hour until it is crispy brown and fully cooked!
- Traditional baking I use infrequently, but when I have used it to cook dinner rolls or to bake potatoes it performs flawlessly.
- The unit does have a broil function. It has 2 settings - low and high and the door is hinged so that you can keep it open slightly for broiling.

The controls are touchpad and I believe you can program to start or stop at timed intervals. but I have not used this feature.

Things I like about this appliance:

- Warm up time. It takes less than five minutes to get this oven up to 400 degrees.
- Speed. As I mentioned above this thing is a speed demon compared to a traditional oven or other toaster ovens.
- Size. It has a small footprint, yet the interior is much larger than you would expect. With the 3 shelf levels, there is never a problem fitting items in it.
- Clean up. Self cleaning interior, the front panel is solid with no nooks and crannies, so just wipe it down with a sponge. There is a stainless steel drip tray at the bottom, just slide it out and clean – couldn’t be better designed.

Things I don’t like about this appliance:
- Price. This unit is higher priced than all of the other competing brands.
- The glass front door got smoky colored after a few weeks and despite repeated cleanings, it has stayed that way.
- The timer. You can have the unit beep after a set amount of time to remind you that something needs checking. What’s annoying about this one is that it will keep beeping forever until you hit the timer button again. I suppose this is a safety feature, but it can get annoying.

Prior to purchasing this unit I researched other brands and model such as Delonghi and the Black & Decker models. At first I was put off by the high price of the Cuisinart, but in my research a couple of key things were mentioned by other user reviews I read. They mentioned the evenness of the cooking and the fact that this oven is small in size yet has a very large capacity inside. These all turned out to be absolutely true in my experience.