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Breville bov650xl

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Like just about everyone else in the free world, I grew up with a GE Toast-R-Oven. I cooked everything from toast (of course) to pizza bagels (a great discovery back in the 70s) to TV dinners and even baked fish in it.

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When the one I received as a gift when I bought my first house finely gave up the ghost, I replaced it with a $100 Hamilton Beach tabletop convection oven could bake a whole loaf of bread, two pies or a meatloaf.

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It even had a rotisserie with a spit you could impale a chicken on, though I never tested this feature. I used it for several years, and it did everything you would expect of a compact toaster oven- except make toast. The burners were just too far apart.

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Enter the Breville. Rather than the mechanical timer and temperature control of the Hamilton Beach (and the GE before it) this unit has fully electronic control that promises to be more accurate in both functions. It can handle (they say) a 12" pizza, and 4 slices of toast. So how does all this work in practice?

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As a toaster, it's great. It toasts more evenly than my $20 Target toaster, and the slide out crumb tray makes cleaning easy. Repeatability if excellent, and of course you can watch the bread/bagel/whatever as it toasts, keeping an eye out for burning.

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It compensates for heat buildup when you toast multiple items in sequence- a major help. Still, for close to $200 you expect more than just toast from a machine like this.

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I haven't tried baking a pie yet, but I did do some miniature muffins, and they came out fine. I haven't done any bread yet, as it's just too small to handle a standard loaf of the size I bake. Maybe I can make some buns or rolls in it.

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The timer function is a bit annoying in the way it works. You set the time and temperature, and when it comes up to temperature, it starts the countdown. This is fine for frozen pizzas and TV dinners, but less helpful for bakers trying to control the baking environment.

I'd prefer something that would come up to temperature and then wait for me to start the timer.

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Half the functions on the main knob are for preset cooking programs- like the microwave ovens in lunchrooms that have buttons labeled "soup", "sandwich", and so forth.

There's a "cookies" function, but I have dozens of different cookie recipes with different time and temperature settings.

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A great toaster, and a useful oven for baking very small items. It's a little deeper than the old Toast-R-Oven, but still not big enough to handle more than a quarter sheet of cookies or a small pie. Useful, for what it is, but given the price, it's getting close to being a luxury easy bake oven.

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I think the Breville BOV800XL The Smart Oven 1800-Watt Convection Toaster Oven with Element IQ, which adds convection and a somewhat larger oven is a better deal overall, and if you really want a useful secondary oven, something like my Hamilton Beach 31197R Countertop Oven with Convection and Rotisserie is a lot more flexible.

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