Do toaster ovens cook faster? This is a common question among people who may be considering buying one of these units. In contemporary times, many people believe that time is money. If they can find a way of doing things quicker, they will certainly use that way.
If you spend a whole day at work and then come home later to prepare dinner, you will certainly appreciate any gadget in your kitchen that will make cooking times less.
There are a number of advantages that come with using an oven that cooks faster. It saves your time so that you use any extra time you have to do more productive things like spending time with your family. Also, when you take less time cooking, you are saving energy.
By serving energy, you are not only putting money back in your pocket, you are also being friendly to the environment. Before we attempt to answer the question whether a toaster oven cooks faster, let’s look at how this type of oven cooks.
How a Toaster Oven Cooks
The toaster oven cooks your food by using heat currents produced by heating elements. These elements can be placed at the bottom, back and top sides of the oven. As the user, you select the temperature you want according to your recipe. Once you have turned the oven on and selected the temperature, the food is heated either by normal heat or infra-red radiation.
Toaster ovens can also deploy convection methods of heating food. In this type of oven, heat is not just left to circulate naturally; a fan is used to drive the heat around the oven. The main advantage of this is that you get food that is evenly cooked as the temperature around the oven is bound to be the same because the hot air is constantly moving from one place to the next.
Which Toaster Oven?
Before we attempt to answer the question on whether a toaster oven will cook faster, let’s get one thing out of the way.Toaster ovens is made by different companies. This means that it is difficult to speak about every toaster oven as if we were speaking about the same product. If you buy a bad product, you may actually discover that it takes a lot more time to cook your food than a good fixed oven.
If you want to see how good a toaster oven is, you will need to do your homework. Read reviews by others who have used the oven that you are planning to buy and see what they say about it. Ask about the power of the unit you want to buy. If you get a bad one, you will realize that it just dries your food and fails to produce the required power to cook the food properly.
In this article, when we say that toaster ovens cook faster than regular fixed ovens, we are comparing the good ones on both sides.
Reasons Why Toaster Ovens Cook Faster
It is generally agreed that toaster ovens cook faster than your regular kitchen oven. Some casual statistics indicate that the saving in time can be up to 30%. This means that food that would have taken 1 hour to cook will actually take only 42 minutes. This is a saving of 18 minutes per hour.
Add this together and in three occasions you have actually saved almost an hour. There are a number of things you can do with one more hour. You can also imagine the amount if serving when it comes to energy.
We want to look at some of the reasons why toaster ovens would cook faster. Otherwise, this could be one of those things we hear every day and just accept without thinking.
They Are Smaller
Toaster ovens are smaller than your fixed kitchen oven. This means that it takes less time for heat to circulate inside the oven than it does in a bigger oven. When the heat circulates faster it means that the food starts cooking earlier than it would on a bigger oven.
If the fixed oven has a bigger surface from which heat can escape, a toaster oven is much smaller and the surface for the heat to escape is also smaller too. The size of these ovens also means that the food is not too far from the elements and therefore cooks faster.
Convection Moves Air
In convection ovens, there is actually a fan that will blow the air around the oven whereas in other types of ovens the air is allowed to move at its own pace. When food cooks in a normal oven, there is a thin layer of air that tends to accumulate around the food being cooked and insulates it from the hot air.
The blowing mechanism of the convection toaster blows this air away and gets it heated by the elements. This ensures that all the air inside the oven is the same temperature and therefore ensuring even cooking of your meal.
The Cooks Know
We believe that cooks who use both the toaster ovens and normal fixed ones know what they are talking about when they advise in recipes that when using a toaster oven you should check your food for doneness ten minutes ahead of what the recipe advises. This indicates that in their experience, they have discovered that a toaster oven cooks faster than the fixed ones.
We hope that by now you have a general idea why toaster ovens are better for you if you want to save time. They take less time to preheat as they have smaller surfaces where the heat needs to be spread when compared to your standard fixed oven.
When the food is cooking, it is closer to the element than it is in other ovens. In convection ovens, the fact that the air is forced to circulate ensures shorter cooking times. We did earlier indicate that we cannot speak for all the ovens in the market, however, we know that we can speak for the good ones.
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