Mini ovens
This category holds electric countertop ovens of nine and ten litres and beside them a single-deck pizza oven with a baking stone. The volume comes first, because nine litres will hold a tray for a couple of slices of toast or a small baking dish, but not a whole chicken. Seven hundred and fifty watts mean slower heating than in a full-size oven, but in return the appliance runs from an ordinary socket. And the control goes from a hundred to two hundred and thirty degrees, while the sixty-minute timer switches the oven off by itself.
Mini ovens
This category holds electric countertop ovens of nine and ten litres, both with a rack and a tray, and beside them a single-deck electric pizza oven with a baking stone thirty-five centimetres across. A small oven is not a shrunken large one, because it has far less power and a smaller inside, so you cook in it differently. It pays off where you do not want to heat the big oven, that is for one or two dishes, for warming up or in a kitchenette with nothing built in. The four points below decide whether it is enough for you, and all four stand right in the listing.
The first thing is the volume of nine to ten litres. Nine or ten litres will hold the tray that comes with it, a couple of slices of toast, a small baking dish or two portions of meat. What does not go in is a whole chicken, a cake tin twenty-six centimetres across and a tray for four people at one go. What settles it is the inner measurement and not the litre as such, so measure the height and the width of the dishes you mean to use.
The second is the power and the heating time. The small ovens here have seven hundred and fifty watts and the pizza oven thirteen hundred, whereas a large electric oven sits around three kilowatts. The lower power means longer heating and less reserve when you open the door, but also that the appliance runs from an ordinary socket and asks for no circuit of its own. For a single dish the small oven therefore works out cheaper, because for two slices of toast you do not heat the whole inside of a big one.
The third is the temperature range and the timer. The ten-litre oven controls from a hundred to two hundred and thirty degrees, which covers gratins, finishing off a bake and meat, but for a proper pizza it is too little, whereas pizza ovens of this class go to about three hundred and fifty degrees. The sixty-minute timer is not merely an alarm clock, because at the end of the count it switches the oven off by itself, so you do not leave it running by mistake. Split a longer bake over two runs, then, and reckon that the oven holds the heat for a while after it switches off.
The last one is the stone in the pizza oven. The stone holds far more heat than a rack or a thin tray, so the dough gets the heat from below at once and the base sets instead of steaming in its own moisture. The porous surface also draws moisture out of the dough, and that is the whole difference between a crisp base and a rubbery one.