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While toaster ovens are an incredibly helpful appliance to have in your kitchen, they can end up creating all kinds of havoc. If you put certain foods or cooking materials in your toaster oven, it may pose a fire risk. Let's take a closer look at the most important things to avoid putting into your toaster oven to ensure your kitchen doesn't, well, burn down.
We’ll kick things off with the number one most important kind of food to avoid putting in your toaster oven: fatty or greasy foods. Since certain toaster ovens are designed with exposed heating elements, dripping or splattering foods can potentially causing a fire. It’s simply not worth the risk. If you’re still committed to reheating fatty foods in a toaster oven, make sure to secure them in a covered baking dish.
A big part of successfully using your toaster oven is to make sure that you maintain a watchful eye over what you’ve chosen to reheat. This rings especially true for seeds and nuts, because they can end up burning very quickly. While the toaster oven is a particularly easy way to reheat seeds and nuts for a healthy snack, just make sure that you don’t leave them unattended.
While you have some wiggle room when it comes to putting certain bakeware into your toaster oven, remember that the oven's heating elements are much closer to your cookware or bakeware. Because of this, you want to be absolutely sure that they’ve been clearly marked “oven safe” and/or “broiler safe.”
Steer clear of trying to reheat pastries like cinnamon rolls in the toaster oven, especially if they’re frozen. This is because they can end up drying out, and from there it’s a slippery slope to a cinnamon roll that’s been unfortunately reimagined as an unpleasant, crispy mess.
Related: How to Make Store-Bought Cinnamon Rolls Taste Extra-Delicious and Homemade
You don’t want to reheat rice in the toaster oven. This can cause the rice to become very crispy, especially on the bottom. You should also note that you can end up getting food poisoning from eating reheated rice. The potential for food poisoning doesn’t stem from the rice being reheated, but how it's stored.
Uncooked rice can contain spores of Bacillus cereus, which is a bacteria that can contribute to food poisoning. Those spores are able to survive in rice even after it’s been reheated. The bottom line? Make sure that you don’t leave your rice standing at room temperature for hours on end before reheating it.
Related: The Absolute Best Way To Reheat Pizza Is Not In The Oven
Yet again, the golden rule to safely operating your toaster oven is to not put anything in there that couldn’t be put in your regular oven. Generally, most paper — which includes wax paper — along with wooden bowls, utensils, plastic wrap, and storage containers that aren’t marked as oven-safe are not suitable for the toaster oven. Lastly, even though aluminum foil is safe to use in a toaster oven, you’ll want to make sure that it’s not actually touching the toaster oven’s heating elements.
You’re not alone if you found yourself surprised over toast making this list. The literal name of the appliance having “toast” in it can lead you to believe that toast would be the most natural thing to use a toaster oven for. However, a toaster oven isn’t actually designed for toasting bread.
It can take longer to toast your bread in a toaster oven when compared to using a traditional toaster. Plus, a regular toaster is able to cook your toast much more evenly. Last, many toaster ovens only have a single heating element located on the top of the machine, as opposed to being on both the top and bottom. This requires you to flip the bread at the halfway point while toasting it, an extra step that no one needs.
When it comes to a surefire way to make a great bowl of popcorn, you’ll want to stick with using a microwave, an air popper, or even a traditional skillet — and steer clear of the toaster oven. Never use your toaster oven for cooking bagged popcorn. That paper bag can end up inflating while being riskily perched next to the heating coils located on the upper and side walls of your toaster oven. Hot coils and paper popcorn bags do not play well together, at all.