19 out of 19 people found this review helpful.
Works okay if you can put up with the quirks
Date of Review: Dec 13, 2003
The Bottom Line: Has some nice features, but with its buggy controls and a crumb tray that doesn't quite cover the heavy-usage areas, I wouldn't recommend this one.
When I was shopping for a toaster oven, I was looking for a larger sized toaster oven that could handle six to eight slices of french bread or reheat 3 pieces of pizza at once. This one seemed to meet my requirements, and with such a good brand reputation, I figured I couldn't lose.
The good points about this toaster oven are its large capacity, oversized crumb tray, and sleek styling. It can easily handle 6 slices of french bread, but the browning control for the toaster is over sensitive. I have never set it to more than medium-low. Any higher than that and you have burnt cinders for your toast. A lot of this may have to do with the position of the rack, but since there are only two positions - low, which brings it too close to the lower burners, and medium, which brings it a bit too close to the upper burners - there's not much choice in the matter.
The crumb tray, while nicely sized, ends just short of the front part of the oven. Unfortunately, this is just the place where most of your crumbs are made since you put in and pull out food at the front. I've found that the majority of my crumbs land on the front lip of the toaster oven just outside the crumb tray, which defeats the purpose of having the crumb tray.
A final and really annoying quirk about the oven is that it will, at random times, start to buzz non-stop if you forget to turn the function knob to "off" after using the "toast" function. I know this sounds self-explanatory until you realize that the oven in the "toast" function turns itself off when the desired browning is reached just like a toaster turns off when it pops your bread out. With your toast done, you would normally retrieve and eat it without further ado. But if you don't turn the function knob explicitly to "off," you will hear a high-pitched buzz from the toaster at some random time in the future - it could be hours, it could be days. The only way to stop the buzz is to turn the knob to "off" or unplug the oven. The first time this happened to me, I thought something was wrong and took it back to the store to exchange it. When it happened again, I called the company, and the response from them was basically "It's a feature, not a bug." But even the customer service person admitted she'd gotten lots of calls about it and didn't understand why it was a "feature" since the oven was off, and there was no safety concern.
In short, the TOB-30 takes a lot of getting used to and is picky about the way you handle it. Once you figure it out, it does its job, but I expected better from a company like Cuisinart. I'm basically satisfied with it, but if I had to do it over again, I'd look for something else.
