Why Your Kitchen Still Needs a Toaster (Even If You Have an Air Fryer)

Your kitchen should have the right tools. Welcome to A Guide to Gearing Up Your Kitchen, a series where I help you outfit the space with all the small appliances you need (and ditch the ones you don’t).

In the age of smart tech, it can be difficult to assess when simple is actually better. Such is the case with the modest toaster. Why even buy this clunky, single-task appliance when you can use your conventional oven or, better yet, your prized air fryer? Even with the exciting advancements in modern kitchen gadgetry, when it comes to perfectly toasted bread, the slot toaster outperforms them all.

My partner and I are obsessed with our basket-style air fryer. Its high-velocity, convection-forced winds roast veggies quickly, and crisp crusts like no other, but I’ll never toast bread with it. The problem is, both the conventional oven and the air fryer dry out your bread in the worst way.

Perfect toast has some dryness, naturally, as evaporation is part of the process, but it should have a flexible, tender element too. The edges and sides should be slightly crisp and browned, and the crumb should still be hydrated in the center. This is best accomplished with close, direct heat, for a short period of time. That means all the pressure falls on where the heating elements are placed in relation to your precious carbs. 

If you want to hear me explain, watch this video:

Where the conventional oven and air fryer fail

The conventional oven heats food with ambient, indirect heat. The air inside of this 3.5 cubic foot box has to come up to temperature first, and that is what cooks the food, not direct, high heat from the electric coil or gas flame. The heating elements may be on the top or bottom of the oven, which is good for heating both sides of the bread at once; however, they’re usually eight to 10 inches away from the actual food. These factors combined mean your slice of sandwich bread needs to sit in there for quite some time. By the time the toast takes on any color at all, it’s completely desiccated. (The broiler can work, but that much firepower requires flipping and undivided attention if you don’t want charcoal.)

The air fryer has a different problem: The heating element is much closer, but it’s only coming from the top. This requires you to flip your bread halfway through the cooking time to toast the other side. While that added time is not a huge inconvenience, there’s still the issue of the hurricane-level winds from the convection fan. The convection function is indispensable for rapidly whisking away moisture, which makes the air fryer excellent at crisping the skin on chicken wings or fried foods, but sadly, leaves bread utterly brittle. 

For perfect toast, you need a toaster

The simple slot toaster solves all of these problems. Instead of ambient heat, there are electric coils that sit a quarter or half-inch away from the bread. There’s not just one giant heating coil at the top; instead, there are multiple small ones that hit both sides of each piece of bread. This double-sided direct heat decreases the overall cooking time and toasts just the outside of your carbs. The slot toaster saves the day with slightly crunchy edges, perfect color, and a warm but hydrated and tender interior. 

There’s a slot toaster out there for you:

If you’re on team toaster oven, I get it. Growing up, we had one in our kitchen and the toast was pretty good. It’s better than using an air fryer and it’s much more reasonable than toasting bread in a conventional oven. That being said, if you’re a big toast lover and you have the means and the space, there’s nothing better than a good, old-fashioned slot toaster. You deserve it.