Learning how to use a mini oven is important if you’re investing in a slightly smaller cooking solution for your home or apartment. A mini oven or toaster oven is a convenient tool for many homeowners who want to be able to cook a range of meals without taking up the same amount of space as they would with a regular full-sized oven.
However, a mini oven isn’t just smaller than most conventional ovens. Many of these appliances also come with different cooking settings, heating elements, and temperature controls, which means that cooks need to learn how to use new features and settings to get the right results.
Here’s what you need to know if you’re using a toaster oven for the first time or planning on installing a mini oven in your home.
Who Might Use a Mini Oven?
Before you begin exploring what you can do with a toaster oven or mini-oven, you might wonder why you would consider one of these cooking appliances over a standard oven. There are a number of answers to this question. A toaster oven or mini oven is excellent for cooking smaller portions of food with minimal power if you’re living in a one-person household.
Instead of buying an expensive oven that costs a fortune to run, you can avoid high energy bills and cook different foods to suit your various needs. Toaster ovens and mini ovens are generally more versatile than microwaves or toasters on their own, and they can be ideal if you have limited space in your kitchen.
The dimensions of a mini oven or toaster oven might be small, but the potential of these products can be significant, depending on your individual cooking needs.
just ordered a mini oven can't wait to burn down the building
— nadine | clown era (lu crew) (@ddisappointed) October 11, 2021
How Do You Use a Mini Oven?
The good news for anyone concerned about using mini ovens for the first time is a toaster oven usually works in much the same way as a traditional oven. Depending on the kind of oven you buy, you’ll be able to cook various foods using roasting, baking, and grilling techniques.
The smaller dimensions of a toaster oven often mean the heating coils and ignition mechanisms are closer to the tray or shelf you’ll use to cook foods like pizza and chicken. With this in mind, you’ll need to be extra careful to avoid setting certain materials on fire. The different materials you’ll need to be more cautious in using in a toaster oven than in a regular oven are Pyrex dishes, glass, foil, and paper.
When buying a toaster oven, make sure you look at the dimensions you’re dealing with and what features you’ll be able to access. Different toaster oven or mini oven products will have various extra features, like browning settings or preheating to get the oven hot before you start cooking. It’s also worth reading the instructions provided with your mini ovens to ensure you understand what you can fit in the oven and how to use it safely.
Things To Look Into When Buying a Mini Oven
Right Size
Some manufacturers of toaster ovens and mini ovens ensure there’s enough space between the heating elements to fit various forms of toaster oven pans and dishes into the body of the oven. Be careful not to choose cooking accessories that may be too big for your oven, as a snug fit could lead to glass cracking or other materials warping.
Cooking Settings
Most toaster oven and mini oven models come with a range of ways to cook your foods. For instance, some products have a separate cooking setting when you want to bake certain goods and another cooking setting when you’re going for roasting and broiling. Make sure you understand the settings before you start cooking.
Timer Features
Timer features can include everything from preheating settings that switch on a light when your oven gets hot to alarms that let you know when your food should be done cooking. Check you know how to properly use the range of different time features on your oven before you begin using it.
Tips for Using Mini Ovens Correctly
The first step in making the most of your toaster oven is doing your research. Learn as much as you can about the mini oven you’re going to buy and what kind of features it can offer. You should be able to adjust the temperature according to your specific cooking needs, preheat the oven, and even use power-saving modes to keep energy usage low.
When you’re buying a mini oven, check for videos and other sources of key information on the company’s website or the product page. This should give you a better insight into how to get started with cooking various foods at home.
Read the Instructions Carefully
Remember, it’s best to know how to troubleshoot your oven and maintain it correctly. Your mini-oven or toaster oven should come with instructions on how to treat the inside and the outside of the oven with cleaners to keep it working properly. It should also give you a range of ways to troubleshoot issues and determine where cooking error codes come from.
Reading the instructions on your mini ovens will ensure you have all the information you need to cook food without putting your home at risk. Like all things, using a mini oven can have a bit of a learning curve if you’ve never encountered one before. Make sure you know exactly how each button and setting works.
Prepare Food Correctly
You still need to prepare the food you’re going to be cooking to ensure it cooks properly. Check how long it takes to cook each food item and remember that some mini ovens can cook food a lot faster because there’s less space for the hot air inside the cavity to circulate. You may need to cut down on the recipe’s suggested cooking time.
Measure the Inside of Your Oven
Aside from an unevenly cooked meal, knowing exactly how much space you have in your mini ovens is crucial to using them safely. If the thing you want to cook is too wide or too tall, there’s a good chance you could end up damaging your mini oven and even creating a fire hazard in your home.
Take Safety Precautions
With any new item in your home, it’s important to be cautious. Make sure you don’t leave your food unattended for too long in your toaster oven. If you notice any smells of something burning, make sure you turn the oven off immediately.
Don’t Overfill the Oven
Just because a rack seems to fit perfectly into your mini oven doesn’t mean you should fill it with a large pizza or a full chicken. Make sure you leave enough room in the office for the air to circulate and the temperature to remain consistent. Otherwise, you risk burning your food and causing dangerous results.
How Do You Bake in a Mini Oven?
Most mini ovens come with a choice of different cooking settings you can choose from when you want to cook certain kinds of foods. When you want to get started with baking in your toaster oven, find the “bake” setting on your device. This is the setting you can use to help circulate air more evenly around the inside of your oven for baking.
Remember, the size of your toaster oven means there will be a difference between baking in one of these ovens and baking in a regular oven. For instance, the oven will usually reach the set temperature for your cooking needs a lot faster due to the small size.
Your oven will usually bake faster, so you may need to use some experimentation to find the best baking times for your favourite recipes. For an easy way to save time in the future, check on your baking around 5 to 10 minutes faster than you would with a regular size oven.
After buying a mini oven, you can also write new cooking times on recipes you find to make it easy to cook to the perfect level. When baking in your mini ovens, remember to:
- Find the bake setting and set the temperature to perhaps slightly lower than you usually would with a larger full power oven. Mini ovens are great for saving time on cooking.
- Check your food regularly, turning the pan or tray when you need to. Some toaster ovens have hot spots which can heat faster than the rest of the oven.
- Be careful with positioning, don’t fill your mini ovens too full when baking, and avoid placing a tray too close to the heating elements. Most foods will rise when they bake, which can mean certain ingredients stick to the heating elements.
It can help to use the timer options on your mini ovens when you’re baking. On the other hand, it’s usually a good idea to keep a close eye on your food, as the cooking directions you’d usually use with a full oven may not be suitable for a smaller product.
I made the banana breads!!! With a lot of chocolate. I'll have to figure out the best timing for baking in the mini oven, cause I burnt it a little. 🤔 pic.twitter.com/xxjmNSl4Eu
— bobbinslave ✨ etsy shop (@bobbinslave) May 4, 2020
Just the Right Size
Learning how to use your mini oven can seem complex if you’ve never encountered a toaster oven of your own before. However, once you read the instructions and start experimenting with settings, you shouldn’t have a problem using your toaster oven regularly.
Remember, pay attention to the changes in cooking times between products cooked in your regular oven vs a toaster oven. It can take a while to get used to the differences here. Make notes so you don’t make any mistakes with your favourite meals and end up burning them.
Do you own a mini oven? Do you find it easy to use? Share your experience in the comments below!
Additional Resources
Tom is a former chef turned full-time food blogger. He has always been passionate about food, and loves nothing more than experimenting in the kitchen and sharing his recipes with others. Tom’s blog is one of the most popular food blogs on the internet, and he has won numerous awards for his cooking. When he’s not blogging or cooking, Tom enjoys spending time with his wife and two young children.