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List Price: $109.99
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I bought this product at Sam's Club the other day. The product is great and I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in a rotisserie. Having a regular toaster oven and a convection oven in the same unit is a great bonus! The unit comes with two wire shelves, two pizza racks (like cookie sheets but with holes in the bottom; great for Hot Pockets) that fit on top of the wire shelves, a 1" deep backing pan, a wire rack that fits inside the backing pan, two rotisserie forks (for holding the meat on the spic), a rotisserie spic, and a rotisserie handle (for lifting it out of a hot oven).
Installation: A piece of cake. The unit comes packed in Styrofoam with the shelves and pans inside the unit; the rotisserie accessories came loose in the box but bagged in plastic. All I had to do was to wipe it down, wash the racks, and plug the box in.
Performance of the toaster oven: It toasts but boy is there a lot of room in here.
Performance of the convection oven: Never having used one before, I was surprised by the fans going off in the oven. But it did its job well cooking a pair of Hot Pockets to crispy perfection in just a little more time than the microwave. Homemade pot pies also cook very well.
Performance of the rotisserie: Great! I've cooked a beef roast and a Rock Cornish Hen and they came out so flavorful, tender, and juicy. The fat melts off this way and the drippings end up at the bottom. Make sure to cover it with a piece of foil. The unit says it can do up to a 7 ½ lb. bird, but I've only tried up to 4 lbs.
Cleanup: The bottom pan slides out for easy cleanup.
Overall I recommend this unit. Although I've never had a rotisserie or a convection oven to compare it to, it is world's better than my toaster oven. It is also ½ the price of the George Forman unit plus adds more. How can one go wrong?
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Actual rating 4 1/2 stars. A half point deduction for door misalignment. The door doesn't seal like it's suppose to. It's not really a seal but a much larger gap than allowed. Either the the frame or the door is slightly warped. A minor error, however, as it still bakes near perfectly and I didn't detected any real heat escaping. I still consider the build of the oven very good.
I tested all features and they work excellent. Convection is very good and cooks much faster and is quiet. Much more quiet than the Toastmaster convection which was extremely noisy! This feature is also handy for quick warm-ups or making bread rise. The rotisserie also works very good. You must tie the the chicken up well, however.
The timer does not exactly stop on zero. It seems to go on 2 minutes or more. Again, a minor thing. Just compensate for this. It could be because the timer is also the on\off switch.
Using a drugstore temperature gauge I found the reading between the gauge and the oven off by about 25-50 degrees. However, everything cooks excellent using the oven degree markings. No undercooked items. In fact, this thing cooks much faster than recommended time in most recipes, sometimes much faster! For instance, on its rotisserie feature I found a 3 1/2 pound chicken could of been done about 15 minutes (or more) earlier than the recommended 2 hours! A roll recipe I found bakes about 25% faster than the recipe called for and I didn't even use the convection feature for either! (Note: The oven degree reading and the drugstore temp gauge reading were the same when using the convection feature.)
One caveat: I did find the the broil feature slightly weak for red meats, (it more like bakes it) but it did cook the fish nicely (crisp skin) at near exact recommened times.
When using this oven over 400 degrees the sides and top of the oven gets hot, including the controls! I must note this oven has no insulation of any kind. It also has no oven light, but one is not really needed, but it would be nice.
Includes a pamphlet type cookbook that is only a guide, but it does give sample recipes for every feature. Enough to get you started on what it is capable of. Includes two racks, a roast pan with separate grill rack, and a aluminium pizza pan with small holes througout. For handy cleanups the bottom of the oven can be easily pulled out and washed.
To give you some idea of its size, it can handle a 12" pizza, two if you have another of its pizza pan. (Though I never tried it). The rotisserie can handle up to a 5lb chicken. The oven a 7lb roast chicken. The oven interior is about 12" front to back (not including curved glass door), about 13" side to side, and about 10" from top burner coil to bottom burner coil, with each coil about 1/4" to 1" away from the metal surface respectively. The roast pan that comes with it has an inside dimension (excluding the lips) of about 11 1/2" by 9 3/4".
Overall, a very good small oven for the price.
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This is not a $500 Cuisinart, but then it's not $500. I found mine at Macy's for about thirty percent less than most retailers, and at that price it was certainly worth trying. I bought mine to replace a fifteen year old toaster oven that I often found myself pushing beyond its limits. (It also caught fire while toasting frozen lumpia, but that's another story)
Plusses? Inexpensive, large capacity, room to cook a small turkey or a couple loaves of bread without heating up the big stove. Minuses? It's kind of lightweight. The rotisserie won't handle much of a load. It's slow to heat up, especially compared to the typical toaster over. And it won't make toast.
But overall, it's not a bad deal, and if you entertain with a small kitchenas I doit's pretty useful.
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Followup: I've had this oven for two and a half years now, and it's still in almost daily use. You can't say that about too many inexpensive products these days.
Honest reviews on Hamilton Beach 31197 Countertop Oven with Convection and Rotisserie
Pros: This oven serves me quite well for all of my baking and broiling needs. I like that you can choose between bake and convection bake so that you don't have to use the convection feature if you don't want to. When using convection the fan is nice and quiet. I like having a timer so that I can leave the kitchen and not worry about burning something. The timer bell is perfect one solid ding that you can hear from another room. Having two racks is great since you can have two things going at the same time. My oven is on a cart at eye level and several people have commented on how good looking it is. The way the crumb tray slides out easily without even opening the oven door is the most convenient I've ever seen. I've had my oven for 2.5 months and so far I am as happy as can be with it. I've made all kinds of things homemade rolls, Christmas cookies, Mahi-Mahi fillets, pizza, roasted veggies, just to name a few, and everything turns out good.
Cons: The instruction booklet is laughable, it contains no useful information at all. I want to buy a convection cooking cookbook, mostly to learn how to dehydrate stuff. If you are a toast lover you will need a separate appliance for that because this oven is too tall to cook both sides of a slice of bread at once.
My oven came with one pizza pan, one baking/broiling pan with rack, two oven racks, and the rotisserie kit. I have not used the rotisserie feature yet.
UPDATE May 19, 2007 here it is well over two years later and the oven is still working perfectly. So glad I picked this one.
July 24, 2009 Still going strong as my only oven! Only one thing showing wear and that is the door handle. It's loose but still attached. I hope it holds on!!
By the way I can make toast with this oven after all I use the top rack in its highest slot, set the oven on "broil" and when the top of the bread is toasted I turn it over to do the other side. It would be easier to have a toaster but my kitchen is so small I don't know where I'd put one.
Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Hamilton Beach 31197 Countertop Oven with Convection and Rotisserie
I love this oven! You can reheat fried foods with the convection oven to get things nice & crispy instead of soggy, like a microwave. In fact, it is good enough to fry without oil, such as spraying sliced potatoes with Pam & then convectioning them until they are crisp outside & tender inside.
The Rotiserie is a little small (it only holds 4 pounds) and you need good cotten string to tie wings & anything else that may flop when turning. But the food comes out a nice golden brown while being juicy inside.
However, you can sit a 7 pound roast on top of the roasting rack and still have vegetables in the roasting tray.
The Pizza tray also works well with cookies, but make sure you flatten the pizza dough just before cooking if you plan to use the convection setting instead of the bake setting, since it makes breads rise higher as well as cook faster.
My only complaint was the instruction manual. Having been advertised as having a "Toaster" feature at Sam's, it didn't have instructions for making toast. I called the help number & learned that after preheating for 10 minutes, you can 'broil' bread on the top shelf for 2 minutes, turn over & cook another 2 minutes for toast. You seem to need to preheat the oven for 10 minutes for most cooking tasks. The Outside of the oven becomes hot enough to melt plastic left on it while cooking, so only set metal on top of it (like its accessories).
