Michael Sullivan is a writer covering kitchen equipment and tableware. He has broken more than a hundred drinking glasses to find the most durable.
We get it, the Our Place Wonder Oven’s lovely muted tones are a refreshing change from the sea of stainless steel, white, and black toaster ovens that have proliferated for decades. And its tiny footprint seems perfect for small spaces.
Riding off its nostalgic sell as an “adult Easy-Bake Oven,” this little appliance—the first countertop model from Our Place, the company that makes the pretty but underperforming Always Pan—is racking up views on TikTok and sold out in eight days upon its initial release last summer.
But is it really worth the hype?
The Wonder Oven is touted as a six-in-one appliance that can bake, air fry, roast, toast, broil, reheat, and even steam your food. But in our coverage of toaster ovens, air fryers, and air fryer toaster ovens over the years, we’ve tested and recommended countertop appliances that do most of those things too, often with better results. (And the steaming seems like a gimmick.)
Aesthetics aside, I wanted to see how this little charmer actually performed, so I put it through the same battery of tests I’ve been doing since 2017—everything from toasting bread and baking frozen snacks to roasting whole chickens and baking cakes. Although the Wonder Oven performed better than most dial-controlled analog toaster ovens I’ve tested, it still dished out overbaked cakes, charred brussels sprouts, and burned Bagel Bites.
Anatomy of the Wonder Oven
The good: It’s a looker and easy to use
With colors named blue salt, steam, char, and spice, shopping for a Wonder Oven feels like picking out designer paint colors for your living room walls. They’re tasteful and soothing, so the oven looks great on a kitchen counter no matter which color you choose. Colorful countertop appliances are a growing trend we saw at a recent kitchenware trade show, and we’re thrilled at the prospect of countertop appliances that aren’t an eyesore. But only if they do what they claim to do.
When it’s time to cook, the controls are big, clearly marked, and intuitive to use. The knobs adjust the temperature (from 200 °F to 450 °F), the function (air fry, bake, broil, reheat, roast, and toast), and the 60-minute timer. We also appreciate that the Wonder Oven has an internal light, a feature most non-digital toaster ovens lack.
The bad: It’s pricey for what it does
Along the gamut of toaster-oven-like things we’ve tested (which includes air fryers), our picks start at around $60 for our budget toaster oven pick, the Hamilton Beach 4 Slice Toaster Oven, and go up to around $400 for the Louis Vuitton of air fryer toaster ovens, the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro.
The Wonder Oven lands in between, at nearly $200. But it’s somewhat of a niche appliance. It’s marginally more versatile on a few specific tasks compared with a pod-shaped air fryer but also less effective at air frying. And it’s a lot smaller and less versatile than a full-size air fryer toaster oven.
Several other toaster ovens we’ve tested that cost about $200 work better or offer more versatility (or both) than the Wonder Oven, and a few of them even cost less.
And though the external aesthetics are nice, we were not particularly impressed by the quality of some of the accessories. The baking pan is comically shallow, which is funny—that is, until you burn yourself. When we roasted a whole chicken, the pan filled with hot drippings that sloshed over the edge when we tried to remove the pan from the oven. And the lip of the pan is so low, tossing brussels sprouts with tongs felt like a frustratingly impossible carnival game—they rolled right off the pan with the slightest jostle.
Also, with no hooks or magnets on the door to help eject the pan (a convenient feature most of our toaster oven and air fryer toaster oven picks have), it’s much harder to retrieve your food. When you pull a rack or pan halfway out of the oven, it tips and sends cooking juices and food flying.
The ugly: It burns food before it’s done cooking
Most important: Does it make delicious food? Sometimes. The Wonder Oven made decent toast, cookies, and roast chicken (with skin that was slightly less crispy than from our air fryer toaster oven picks). But it struggled in other areas, often cooking food too quickly on the outside before the center had a chance to finish cooking. Sure, in theory you could adjust the temperature and timing to get better results, but a few features of the oven make this difficult:
You can’t turn off or adjust the oven’s convection fan. We make this a criteria for our air fryer toaster oven recommendations, because it allows for gentler cooking when needed. In the Wonder Oven, this isn’t an option—and we found the fan too powerful (even when programmed at a lower speed) for such a small oven cavity. It also makes a whirring noise at high speed, which is a little annoying, especially when combined with the ticking timer.
The dial setting doesn’t maintain internal temperature well. While the Wonder Oven did better than many non-digital ovens in this respect, it still wasn’t exceptional. I used an air probe thermometer to track the internal temperature of the oven. When the Wonder Oven’s temperature dial was set to 350 °F, the temperature in the cavity swung between 280 °F and 334 °F.
In contrast, our air fryer toaster oven pick, the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, holds a set temperature remarkably well (due to its PID controller). Sure, the Breville costs twice as much as the Wonder Oven. But the Cosori Original Air Fryer Toaster Oven CO130-AO (our budget air fryer toaster oven pick) is similarly priced to the Wonder Oven and outperforms it in this respect, too. And both of those ovens offer roughly twice the cooking volume.
The touted steam feature is gimmicky. According to Our Place, adding a small amount of water to the oven can “breathe new life” into baked goods and help keep roasted meats “extra tender and juicy.” Larger steam ovens (known as combi ovens) are commonly used in professional settings—in bakeries to proof dough and keep it pliable while rising and in restaurants to keep meat moist while roasting. But we were skeptical: The Wonder Oven shares this feature with Balmuda’s The Toaster, which we’ve tested and dismissed.
We weren’t wrong. The minuscule amount of water (1 to 2 teaspoons) from the tiny cup included with the Wonder Oven evaporates almost instantly after being added to the hot oven, thus having no detectable effect on the food. We weighed white sandwich bread before and after toasting to see how much moisture the bread retained, and it lost the same amount with and without adding water. We didn’t notice any significant textural difference between the two batches, either.
Our verdict: Get something that will work better
Yes, the Wonder Oven is cute. But pretty privilege only goes so far. We thought the Always Pan was beautiful, too, but we had concerns about its functionality and longevity.
While the Wonder Oven has proved a little more functional compared with the Always Pan, we’re still not convinced it’s worth the spend. Many people on Reddit who were seduced by this oven’s good looks report being disappointed with its performance, experiencing similar issues we ran into in our tests: an unwieldy tray, uneven cooking, and a noisy fan, to name a few.
We’d recommend investing your money in something that will perform better and prove more versatile.
For cute vibes and toaster oven versatility
Our pick
This compact toaster oven was among the best at evenly toasting bread, baking cookies, and bringing frozen foods to life. It performed as well as or better than competitors that cost significantly more.
If your heart is set on something cute and compact, we suggest the Panasonic FlashXpress Toaster Oven. It makes excellent toast, gooey cookies, and crispy frozen snacks. Although it lacks a convection fan so it technically doesn’t air-fry, it outperforms the Wonder Oven at all the basic cooking tasks we tested—and at $150, it costs less, too.
While the FlashXpress toaster oven has about the same footprint as the Wonder Oven, it has a smaller capacity, so you can’t roast a whole chicken in it—but you can still make crispy chicken thighs. And aside from its performance, we think its retro ’90s look is pretty dang cute.
Or just get an air fryer toaster oven
If you can afford to give up more counter space, you’ll get a lot more bang for your buck by going with a full-size air fryer toaster oven. Our picks all out-perform the Wonder Oven on basic cooking tasks and offer much better value.
Budget pick
This appliance shares many features of models costing twice as much. It doesn’t cook quite as evenly as our pricier picks, but its results in our tests were still decent, especially considering its relatively low price.
For something that costs less and cooks better than the Wonder Oven: The Cosori Original Air Fryer Toaster Oven is comparably priced to, and often cheaper than, the Wonder Oven, but it did far better at most cooking tasks in our tests. It’s a much larger machine—as are all our air fryer toaster oven picks—but that also means you can cook more food at once.
Our pick
This Cuisinart model provides impressively even cooking, a whopping nine-slice toast capacity, a three-year warranty, and some useful accessories.
If you can spend a bit more: We recommend getting one of our all-time favorites, the Cuisinart Chef’s Convection Toaster Oven. It provides impressively even cooking and some useful accessories—including a pizza stone. It’s been our top toaster oven pick since 2015, and it only costs a little more than the Wonder Oven.
Our pick
Unlike most models, this pricey oven performs just as well on air fryer duties as it does on toaster oven tasks. It also has settings for bread proofing, slow cooking, and dehydrating.
And if you really want to splurge: Get the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, which has a more powerful fan for air frying than the Cuisinart model, and additional settings in a sleek interface.
Sure, none of the above models come in modern, classy colors, but until the Wonder Oven’s performance is on par with its stylish aesthetics, you’ll probably be far happier with one of our picks.
This article was edited by Marilyn Ong and Annemarie Conte.
