Customer Ratings & Reviews

I love my oven I will recommend it to all my friends and family.

Quieter than my last one. Lots of settings with even heating.

Some days, the most exhilarating thing you’ll do is read online reviews of toaster ovens. Here’s one more for you. The GE Calrod 6-Slice Toaster Oven with Convection bake is among General Electric’s latest offerings, updating their range of small kitchen appliances to match modern black and stainless steel ensembles throughout the kitchen. The prominence of this toaster oven on the countertop in their marketing shots makes it seem like it should be a permanent fixture in your kitchen, and on that front they’ve mostly delivered. The Calrod is a versatile, efficient toaster oven that excels in most regards, but a few shortcomings keep it from perfection. - Unboxing and Setup The GE Calrod is a sizeable toaster oven with an inner cavity large enough for three rack positions. Despite its size it’s relatively light and easy to position on the countertop. GE recommends positioning the toaster oven with a 4-inch clearance on all sides so heat can dissipate. The power cord appears to be about 5 feet long which should make most positions suitable with countertop AC outlets, but power outlets under or inside cabinets may be a bit tricky. With the power the machine draws I would not recommend using an extension cord unless it’s designed to handle such a high load. The toaster oven ships with its crumb tray uninstalled, and the manual does not indicate how or where to insert properly. I placed it under the heating elements after removing all the tape and packaging materials, before plugging the oven in. The oven will need to be run through one full baking cycle (20 minutes at 400 F) to dissipate residual packing materials; I strongly encourage this as there was definitely a strong plastic odor coming from the unit after a few minutes that dissipated after about 10 minutes. I’d rather not have any of that in my food. I did notice my unit seems to have unlevel feet. With no way to adjust them this is a bit of a bummer, but it doesn’t impact cooking performance. - Cooking Performance Having convection bake in a countertop oven opens up a few new options that were previously limited to full-size ovens. The convection fan generates consistent airflow within the toaster oven, circulating the air evenly and keeping temperatures more uniform within the heating chamber. This can often reduce cooking time while also making for a better, more even crisp on the entire surface of the food. Pressing any button on the Calrod’s control panel will turn the display on and allow you to dial in settings. This is fairly straightforward with one dial controlling the cooking mode or preset, and the other controlling temperature setting and cooking time. Pressing Start begins the oven’s preheating cycle, which takes about 5 to 10 minutes depending on temperature setting, and once complete will beep and pause with the “start” button flashing to begin the cooking timer. It’s worth keeping the manual handy for the first few runs but intuition takes over fairly quickly. Coming from a smaller, analog toaster oven, I was impressed by how much better food came out of the Calrod. Convection bake made a significant difference when cooking chicken, which ended up being much crispier without burning, and quick appetizers also ended up cooking more evenly without the need to turn them halfway through. I was even able to fit a 12-inch frozen pizza in the Calrod - something I thought I would always need the full oven for - and that too came out just as well-sorted as it does from my full size oven. It needs to cook directly on the rack to fit which would usually make handling and removal difficult, but GE includes a handle tool that clips onto the hot rack to make this process much easier. The toaster oven seems to insulate its heat very well. The outer surfaces get hot but never anything that’s terribly concerning, and little heat is felt beyond the door when it’s closed. The control panel does get warm to the touch but it’s also nothing that makes me worry for the longevity of the unit. The heating elements are not terribly noisy, but the convection fan is a little louder than I expected it to be. It’s nothing that will interrupt a conversation but the fan is still heard throughout the kitchen and sounds fairly industrial. My full-size oven’s convection fan, by comparison, is nearly inaudible even when I open the oven door. - Presets & Handling One of the more annoying things I’ve encountered so far with the Calrod is the limited range of presets for certain food types. The most glaring example is the Pizza setting, which can be set to either a 6-inch, 9-inch, or 12-inch pizza, but doesn’t seem to change much when the oven starts up. Worse yet, the 12-inch setting only goes up to a 20 minute cooking cycle, which is much shorter than most of the frozen pizzas I’ve seen (25-35 minutes). I had to cancel the cycle and manage cook settings manually, which is a minor inconvenience but still frustrating for what is aiming to be a one-touch setting. Another inconvenience I found is that while there are 3 heights for the cooking rack, the lack of a slider or other mechanism to bring the tray forward without removing it makes it difficult to turn or flip foods without entirely removing the tray, as sliding it partway forward results in some precarious balancing risking spilling the tray. My previous toaster oven had the tray slide forward when the door opened which made this process much more accessible. - Bottom Line Despite a few quirks and design choices detracting from ease-of-use, the GE Calrod is a great choice for a countertop toaster oven to be used regularly. It looks good, cooks well, and its size & convection features open up more options for countertop cooking rather than using the oven. This a great size for cooking meals for one or two servings at a time, and with a few sacrifices may very well be able to serve as a replacement for a full-size oven in small or space-constrained situations. It’s certainly more economical than an electric range from an electricity usage perspective. With few things to complain about, the GE Calrod comes recommended.

Pros: -Aesthetically pleasing -Easy to use -Preheats quickly -It fits about 4-6 pieces of toast at a time. -It does not heat up the entire house like the use of the oven -Successfully made grilled cheese, pizza, grilled sandwiches, muffins, baked veggies like brussel sprouts and broccoli (wish it would have been able to get them crispier), potatoes, chicken wings Things to be aware of: -Takes up quite a bit of counter space -It gets really hot on the outside. You have to be careful when you open the handle because both my daughter and I burned our fingers (outside frame of the door is really close and doesn’t have a guard of any sort- it’s just hot metal! -Basic functions like toasting- you have to do the setting twice to what a basic toaster will do, and that is it cooking on the highest setting. -Instructions could have been a little more thorough, but once you mess around with the settings you get the hang of the digital board pretty quickly Overall, we feel it is decent enough for what it is but there are cooking implements out there that can do a lot more nowadays such as have an air fryer function etc.

Great GE toaster! Rather large though - very sleek and durable

The GE - Calrod 6-Slice Toaster Oven with Convection bake in stainless steel is a really diverse cooking tool for the money. This toaster oven has a foot print of 18' east to west, 13' front to back, and 11' north to south. Although it is not stealth-like on the counter top, it does warrant the space because of the numerous functions this one machine is capable of doing. The oven already comes with a removable crumb tray, and some other accessories that include the cooking rack, baking tray, and holding rack which are well-packed in the box. The oven comes fully assembled and I particularly like that there are rubber feet which is a bonus built-in safety feature, no-slip or slid. This oven has many modes of operation-toast, bake, broil, pizza, warm, and roast. The led display is large enough to easily see and from an operational standpoint-start, cancel, convection is intuitively controlled by the mode and cooking setting knobs. The oven comes with a very detailed owner's manual that not only explains the different buttons and knobs, but also explains how each knob operates and even the rack position, temperature, preheat or not, default setting, time rage, top or bottom heater, etc. that is used for each mode. In my opinion, this is an easy to use oven that while plain in design, has the clean lines that will be okay in almost anyone's kitchen. . .

GE - Calrod 6-Slice Toaster Oven with Convection bake - Stainless Steel looks great but can it cook? It is surrounded by thin stainless steel which is not fingerprint resistant. Be sure to follow the getting started section first before cooking. They recommend that you first operate it in roast mode for 20 minutes to remove film from the heating elements. This thing gets hot on the exterior especially from the front so make sure you keep it away from plastics and paper. They recommend 4” on all sides and above. This makes it hard for me to find a good space for it because of my limited counter top space. It has four heating elements, two on the top and two at the bottom. It has a three prong plug. It cools down pretty quickly though. A lot quicker than my 15 year old stove of course. It comes with a crumb tray and it is mentioned in the manual but it is not listed an included accessory and it does not show where to place it. It’s a crumb tray so I just put it at the very bottom, duh. It does have a child safety feature and you enable and disable it by holding down the cancel button for 3 seconds. I also have a plug (see picture) with a switch so I don’t have to keep unplugging it for safety when not in use. It toasts bread pretty evenly. A lot better than my pop up toaster. The amount of time to toast depends on how dark and how many slices. It can range from 2mins to almost 5mins. It has three automatic cooking modes: toast, bagel and pizza; four manual cooking modes: roast, bake, broil and keep warm. It takes nine minutes to toast two slices of bagel and it does a good of making it crispy without burning it. In the manual cooking modes, you can adjust the cook time and temperature. I broiled a slab of salmon for 15 minutes at 350 degrees and it turned out pretty good. The skin was crispy and the inside was cooked well. I usually reheat pizza in the microwave but using this keeps the crust crispy. Keeping it clean remains to be seen but seems easy enough just as long as you maintain it. The stainless steel is not fingerprint resistant so frequent wipe down is necessary for me. Overall, I like this oven. I use it pretty much everyday and it's been great. Maybe I can get rid of my pop up toaster, maybe. The only thing is that I lose a lot of countertop space around it but I guess I can just move it away from things when I use it. I hope the stainless steel holds up from rust.

Pros: - Looks sleek and fits in with a modern kitchen aesthetic, stainless steel, box like design - Interesting and useful modes like bagel setting - Roomy interior - Large viewing window - Solid build - Comes with a handle for the grill and baking tray Cons: - Completely anemic alarm. No way to increase volume. Major flaw! - Takes a long time to preheat - Single button for dual options is confusing and often adjusts the wrong setting - Digital controls take some getting used to in comparison to standard analog controls - Crumb tray does not completely cover bottom and it is not even noted in documentation While this is a great looking oven with some interesting features, it disappointed me that GE did not appear do enough consumer testing on this unit to overcome some major flaws that would have been easy and inexpensive to fix before coming to market. For one thing, there is the completely anemic alarm. It is hard to hear in a busy kitchen even when you are near it; God forbid you have your stove hood fan on or listening to something. But who spends their all their time in the kitchen when preparing a meal? Most of get things cooking and then pop into the living room to watch tv or the office to catch up on emails. You would never hear this alarm a room away and trust me I have good hearing – I used to be a performing musician. I even brought my neighbor in for a sanity check; he is a younger family man who is also a foodie like me. He could not believe it and was laughing at how low the volume is. Mysteriously there is no way to adjust the volume; in fact, the only volume related adjustment I could find was a ‘silent mode’ that you can activate. I kid you not, a silent mode on a toaster oven. When have you ever heard of a kitchen appliance with an alarm that was not loud on purpose? My oven, my microwave, my air fryer and my instant pot ALL have alarms that you can hear anywhere on the first floor. Now I have a way around this because I have a Smart Home. I plugged in a voltage monitoring smart switch (after making sure that it could handle the watts/volts that were in play) and then wrote an automation that notified me when the voltage dropped to zero and then played an announcement on my Alexa devices. But not everyone is going to have this solution available to them. Also, while it is fast in toast or bagel modes it is quite slow to preheat. To be fair it does show you how long it will take it does not show you UNTIL you start the cycle, so you will have to use it a few times until you get the timing of your other meal items right. The digital controls may be a bit confusing at first to people who have used an analog toaster oven for decades like me, but I am assuming I will get used to it the more I use it. The dual mode button at the bottom does not help in this effort, with it often changing the wrong setting – which is very frustrating. The thing is these flaws are easy – and in most cases – inexpensive to remedy in manufacturing and the product design stage. A bigger speaker would have cost a few extra cents and there is room for it. The software could have included a “Low/Medium/High” volume setting. A pair of buttons could replace the dual mode button and actually would have been cheaper to implement/source. Heck, the crumb tray does not cover the whole bottom of the toaster and is not even mentioned in the documentation! These are not things I would expect from a GE branded appliance; I have been buying GE appliances for years and have always been impressed with their design, build and longevity. This appliance has some great things going for it; it looks modern and awesome in place. I love the bagel mode that only toasts the inside of the bagel and warms the outside; I use it with rolls too and while I would never have thought it would make that much of a difference, trust me it does. I was impressed that they included a safety handle to move the grill/baking pan – never saw this with any other toaster oven and it is truly a useful addition. No more using a chopstick or burning my fingers. That is why it is mystifying to me that they would drop the ball with the other more obvious stuff like the alarms and controls. I am keeping it because I fixed the alarm problem in my case and I think I can work with the other issues, some of which I think will become less of an issue once I get used to its quirks. It’s too bad because I’d really like to give this a solid recommendation, but I cannot do so. I can only recommend this based on the fact that if you are buying it from Best Buy, you can return it if it doesn’t meet your needs and fortunately BB has a great selection of small kitchen appliances so you should be able to find one you like.

This GE Calrod Convection Toaster Oven is a nice looking appliance to have in your kitchen and living space. The stainless steel finish looks very nice and attractive to go along with your various other stainless steel items. The toaster oven itself is a large appliance that will take up a decent sized footprint on your countertop. Size is 11 H x 18 W x 15 D, so keep this in mind when you make your decision to upgrade to this. This toaster oven offers multiple settings and so much more than just a temperature and timer setting. There are 7 modes on here that have proven to make my household meals much easier to handle and prepare. Modes such as, keep warm, bagel, toast, bake, roast, broil and pizza. Inside the box you get the toaster over, baking rack, a baking pan, and tongs to help pull out the tray without burning your hands. I have been pleased with how well this has handled making toast and bagels every morning. They come out toasted well, without burning them. The oven has a nice large LED display showing the temperature, time, settings. The buttons and turn dial are easy to learn, so be patient in learning the process. I have made a frozen pizza, frozen chicken nuggets, frozen french fries, and eggrolls in here and they've all turned out really great. I have no complaints with this appliance and have viewed this as a major upgrade compared to my old toaster oven. The convection feature on this oven really does a great job at evenly distributing the heat and circulating the air within the toaster oven. That even distribution helps to keep things from becoming too hot on one centralized spot and risk burning. This is very similar to a full sized oven, in a smaller form factor. It works well, and looks nice. It's a win win. PRO: Cooks evenly Looks nice Multiple modes to cook various foods CON: None

Some foods need to be cooked or defrosted from frozen not in a microwave oven but in a real hot oven such as this GE Calrod 6-Slice Toaster Oven with Convection bake. And some food, such as leftover pizza slices, turn to rubber if warmed up in a microwave. This GE toaster oven is perfect for those foods while avoiding the extreme cost of using a regular kitchen oven. We have used it for the simple things such as toast, English muffins and bagels since getting it and like it very much. It is also great for other foods such as cold lasagna, bacon, meats, and chicken wings. The convection fan distributes the hot air around the oven and that means that food cooks more evenly. In addition, we need to mention the simple control panel. Two knobs and 3 buttons control all functions and the easy to follow 3 pages in the simple instruction book makes learning the function fast. If you hate the beep sound those can be turned off; if you have young children there is a way to disable the controls (don’t let them see you do it: young kids are sharp!) In hot weather we will be using this GE toaster oven more since who wants to use the regular large kitchen oven to heat up the house and put more strain on the air conditioning? And in the winter this small oven is great for making breakfast items and also warming up the kitchen. The delivery is in a brown shipping box which contains the shiny “retail box” for GE. So it is well packed in 2 boxes for shipment. Very nice GE and Haier. The oven is made in China by Haier which owns GE consumer products per the owner booklet page.

This toaster has been a great addition to our kitchen; one that we've used quite a bit more already than I expected we would. We've already used it for cookies, pizzas, and other various frozen products for our kids. It's a fantastic option for when we want to cook a very small amount of food and don't want to use our traditional oven. Also, I love having the convection option even when we're not using our larger oven. The controls are incredibly intuitive and very easy to use and the screen is nice and bright and easy to see. On top of that, I love that the screen turns completely off when not in use. The last thing I need is another clock on an appliance in my kitchen. As noted in my photos, the top right area of the door allowed some steam to escape the first time we used it as a toaster. We haven't noticed it since then with other products which leads me to believe this may have been a one time issue. That said, there isn't any gasket to speak of around the door which I was a bit surprised by. Overall, we're very happy with this addition to our kitchen. Highly recommended.

This is a really nice toaster oven with some premium features. Setup was very simple. Just remove the stickers, insert the crumb tray and cooking rack, then plug it in. Along with the oven there is a small baking sheet and a clever tool to pull out the cooking rack without getting burned. While using the oven, the first thing that stood out to me was the feel of the controls.  All the knobs and buttons feel premium and give you solid feedback as you turn or press them.  I was also impressed by the intuitiveness of the controls and the oven's ability to cook at up to 450 Degrees. Additionally, it cooks evenly and the convection fan is quieter than any other oven I've tested.  The only negatives I found are that it takes a little longer to get to temperature, the included cooking tray is very small and the oven doesn't fit a baking dish larger than 12 1/2 inches.  With all that being said, this toaster oven is worth buying and gets my recommendation.

We bought this to replace a B&D model that started falling apart almost as soon as we bought it. So far so good. Easy to use controls and functions. There is a plastic-y scent still when it cooks, even after a month or so if every other day use. Hopefully it will go away.

Great product! Quality oven! Love the digital info panel.

A very nice toaster oven with all the things you need. So glad it has no air fryer. The stainless steel bake pan isn't the best but we just kept an old one.

I bought this as a replacement for a Black & Decker I had for many years. All in all I have found it to do a good job for baking but haven’t used any of the other functions. My criticism is that it cooks in 10 degree increments so I have to select 370 or 380 when I need 375; a small inconvenience but it does require some adjustment in baking. The other criticism I have is that it will not fit a 12 inch casserole dish, which is my most common dish for baking. If this isn’t an issue for you then I think this is a good toaster oven.

Great size to heat up dinner plates and small pizzas.fits 9X13 pan. Only 4 stars as toasting is slow. Heat up takes longer than I'd expect.

Just started using the product it appears that the temperature that is set is not accurate it is cooking and or burning the food. In addition I do not care for the fact that it preheats the oven then goes off and you have to repush the start button. Good possibility I may be exchanging this for a different item.

This product already started to malfunction 1 month in of use. It was making a grinding noise. No assistance with seller to replace.

Got this unit for free. Have not unboxed it. I assume all is good and works well