TOB-40FR Custom Classic Toaster Oven

Refurbished is the way to go! This is a smaller version of the Cuisinart toaster oven I’ve seen at many of my friends’ homes. And I like the smaller size very much – it fits much more inconspicuously on the counter, doesn’t take up very much space but still has plenty of room inside the toaster. It is very easy to use. We typically use it for toasting bagels or bread in the mornings, and so it’s nice that all I have to do each morning is hit the start button. You don’t have to change or turn any other dials if you are using it for the same function. We also use it to heat a lot of things for the kids’ dinners (so we don’t have to wait for the big oven to heat), toasting sandwiches, baking just a few cookies at a time, etc. And the refurbished looks brand new and works great. Came packaged well too. Makes me want to buy all refurbished appliances at these better prices.

Great little oven . Easy to clean.
Perfect size from toast to frozen meals. Highly recommend !

I’m not normally one to write bad product reviews. Most things I buy generally work about as well as I expect them to, and sometimes much better. This Cuisinart is unfortunately not one of them. I bought the refurbished version of this toaster about a month ago, and some of my complaints could be because I still got a bum unit. Not 100% sure if it is working as designed or not, more on that in a bit. First the complaints.

* It takes 5 minutes (not an exaggeration, I timed it) to toast an English muffin. My previous cheap Black and Decker took about 60 – 90 seconds tops to do the same thing.

* The heating element on the bottom doesn’t seem to get warm until the very end of the cycle. The ones on top start glowing pretty quickly, but the ones on the bottom stay black until about 4 minutes into toasting, when they turn kind of pale orange. This is what leads me to wonder if my unit is maybe bad? Maybe this is the reason for the long toasting time also?

Edit: Just read another review that mentioned that the tray came installed upside down. The tray design doesn’t make it obvious, and in fact by looking at it I wasn’t even sure at first that it would fit in the other way, but turning it over made the two related issues go away. Leaving them in the review in case other people have the same problem and adding another star to my review.

* I’ll give the benefit of the doubt for the ones above and say that’s just a broken unit…but there are also bad design choices throughout. The biggest is that you can’t open up the door all the way without removing the crumb tray. So I either have to remove the crumb tray from the hot toaster and then take the toast out (which seems to be the time that I want the tray in there the most) or try to fish out hot toast from a half open door. This is what I end up doing most the time, and of course half the time I end up dropping it and it slides down onto the elements.

* A related gripe, opening the door even part way also pulls out the crumb tray a little bit. Which seems to be by design as well. So you have to push it back in every time you open the door.

* The alarm is also unnecessarily loud and goes off like a microwave. I’d prefer just a short buzz since I’m often making toast in the morning before my wife is up and we have a studio apartment so no walls separating the kitchen from the bed.

* I do want to say one positive, even though it may be partially broken, the thing does make excellent toast. Muffins get a nice and even golden color all over them that I’ve never really seen before. That’s nice and all, but I’m not really all that particular about my toast “shade” and to me it certainly isn’t worth taking 5 minutes and the aggravation of not being able to open the door all the way just to get perfect toast. I’m sure there are other models out there that will do the same thing, my 15 year old B&D that I had before this made perfectly adequate toast that I was happy with, but it certainly wasn’t as evenly done as this Cuisinart. So it gets a star added for that.

Update Jan 2016: I was sent a replacement unit and now both elements heat up at the same time. But it doesn’t seem to change cooking time at all, still 5 minutes to toast even at slightly below the middle shade setting. It also is no longer getting as dark at that setting as it used to. That by itself wouldn’t be too big of a deal, since it was generally a bit darker than I like anyway. But the lack of consistency makes it hard to come to a good setting selection, and I worry about longer term reliability.

And one other small thing that I hadn’t noticed before because I couldn’t open the door all the way, but the toast rack has a bit of a lip on it. Just big enough to make it hard to slide things off of it and directly onto your plate using something like a knife to grab it. So I either have to pick it up with my fingers, or very carefully manipulate it up and over the lip and onto my plate, and with the latter I invariably end up flipping things so that whatever toppings I had on my toast or potato or whatever end up falling off and onto the heating elements. I’m clumsy I admit, but little things like this make me silently curse my toaster every time I use it.

Update as of April 2017:
I hate this toaster. It’s stopped being even remotely consistent with the toast shade, which was basically the only thing it had going for it originally. Additionally, the door started getting jammed when open only part way. I think this is somewhat by design so that you can prop the door open a crack while broiling, but over the last few weeks it got harder and harder to get past that point, and whatever the hinge was hanging up on is internal to the toaster and could not be easily seen. So today, while trying to get my sandwich out of the toaster the door was so stuck that I ended up ripping the handle off the door trying to get it open. And I was actually happy to have done so, because now I can hopefully find a toaster oven that doesn’t drive me crazy every time I use it.