How to Clean a Toaster Oven

Everyone who buys a complicated modern countertop oven is quickly beset with a dilemma: how to clean a toaster oven with nonstick coatings and breakable parts, and lord knows what else. The modern multifeature accessory oven is beset by odd crannies and frangible heating elements. If you convect or air fry a chicken, the grease will fly off in all directions in a fine and oily mist and land, ickily, on the oven walls.

Let all this go unchecked, and your oven will either look bad, smell bad, or both. I test toaster ovens and air fryers for a living, so I've had to clean many variations of oven. And I've made at least one costly mistake along the way, by absent-mindedly thinking it was a good idea to clean grease droppings off a quartz heating element with my thumbnail. (Don't do ...