Just Baking

I love my range, with its capacious workhorse of an oven, but there are times when I just don’t need almost four cubic feet of heat. And my pop-up toaster is okay, but now and then it would be really great to be able to toast more than two slices at once.

So I convinced myself I needed my new Cuisinart Brick Oven. There were those in my household who were skeptical that another appliance would improve our quality of life, but they came around soon enough. The Cuisinart BRK-200 is not perfect, but it fills a long-empty niche in our kitchen.

Although it is classified as a “toaster oven” by almost all the online retailers that carry it, calling this thing a toaster oven is like calling your laptop computer a calculator. It is a fully functional oven that happens to sit on your countertop and can make toast, when it’s not busy with other things. With a hefty pricetag ($249) to match its hefty footprint (19.5W x 18.5D inches), it had better pull its weight, and it does.

The oven can be set to Toast, Broil, Bake, or Convection Bake. While other ovens can do all those things, what sets the BRK-200 (and its sister models, the BRK-100 and -300) apart from other countertop ovens is the included removable 12-inch square baking stone, and the side walls that are permanently lined with the same brick-like material. And, unlike many other ovens, the Cuisinart can be heated to up to 500° F degrees. I can’t say I’ve used many small ovens, nor many brick ovens, but I can say that I am very pleased with way this small brick oven performs.

While putting my oven through its initial paces I stuck with simple, familiar things, so I would know, if something went horribly awry, that the fault lay with the oven and not with me or the recipe. These paces included:

Hearth bread. My favorite sourdough baked beautifully, directly on the stone, on the regular bake setting. The crust had that rustic look as though it came from a real wood-fired brick oven. Because of the small size of the chamber (0.9 cubic feet), steaming the oven was not needed. I found the ideal baking temperature to be somewhat lower than what I use in my big oven, to prevent overbrowning.

Pizza. Again, directly on the stone. Lovely.

Banana bread. It baked perfectly on the regular bake setting, at the same temperature and time as in my big oven. Because the stone was still hot from the pizza, I left it in the oven and placed the loaf pan directly on it.

Chocolate Chip Cookies. Although the included shallow roasting/baking pan is not perfectly flat-bottomed, when lined with parchment it is serviceable as a cookie sheet for up to nine 3-inch cookies. Without the stone, the oven heats to 350° F in about four minutes.

Chicken. I roasted a whole 4-pound bird in one hour flat on the convection bake setting, and it was moist inside, crisp outside. I did have to rotate the chicken halfway through baking because I noticed that the side closest to the front of the oven was not browning as well as the rest of the bird.

Broiled salmon and red peppers (not at the same time). The broiler broils evenly. A broiler pan is included with the oven. By adjusting the position of the pan and oven rack, you can quite precisely control the distance of the pan from the broil element (between 2 and 5.5 inches).

Toast. Bread toasts reasonably (though not 100%) evenly on both top and bottom, but the analog darkness control is not wonderful and requires some experimentation. Somewhere between Light-Medium (in the photo) and Medium – which is really quite dark brown – is where I will stay for most toasting. The toast burned at halfway between Medium and Dark. The lip on the rack impedes sliding the bread out of the oven, so it’s difficult to remove the toast without burning your fingers or using a utensil.

There are a few other things I’m not crazy about. The exterior gets very hot – not so much that you’ll damage yourself if your pain receptors and reflexes are in good working order, but enough to get an “ouch!” out of you. The handles on the door and sides do stay cool, but more than once I’ve brushed my finger against the hot door while opening it with the handle. Other annoyances include the lack of a preheat indicator light, a crumb tray that is removed from the back of the oven, and an interior light that cannot be turned off when the oven is on.

Overall, I love the performance and convenience of the Cuisinart Brick Oven. From now on I will use it any time I need to bake or broil something that fits in there – and that’s a large percentage of the time. It’s wonderful not to have to heat up the big oven (and the kitchen) for small-to-medium jobs. And it doesn’t hurt that the oven is quiet, nice looking, and has a broiler pan that fits in my dishwasher.