Frozen Pizza In a Toaster Oven

Cooking pizza in a toaster oven is one of the biggest benefits I’ve found for investing in my own personal appliance. When I bought my toaster oven, I planned to toast bread and bagels and very little else. But pizza cooking means that I can get a pizza ready while I prepare fries and another side in my main oven.

If you’ve never used a toaster oven, you might not have expected to be able to cook a pizza in a toaster oven. To be honest, not all toaster ovens are actually built for cooking pizzas. You will need one which is large enough to fit an entire pizza in (obviously).

Some toaster ovens actually have a specialized pizza slot at the bottom of the cooking cavity. This makes cooking a pizza as simple as turning the appliance on and slotting your pizza snack in. Easy. Here’s my guide on making sure your frozen pizzas are cooked properly and you get a delicious snack or meal.

Table of contents

• Is A Toaster Oven Big Enough For Frozen Pizza?
• Toaster Oven Settings For Frozen Pizzas
• Reheating Pizza In A Toaster Oven
• Do I Need A Toaster Oven Pizza Stone?
• Conclusion

This one depends on the model that you have. If you want to make small pizzas (7” or less), you can do this in any toaster oven. That’s not the difficulty, however – we want to know about 12” and bigger pizzas.

If you have not specifically searched for a toaster oven with a pizza slot before you bought your appliance, you might find out that you don’t actually have a device that is big enough. This can be a real annoyance, but we can’t do much about it (except upgrade!).

If you bought a device with a specific pizza oven slot, you will be able to slide your frozen pizza into the cooking slot and let it cook. These slots are a great convenience because they are basically designed only to make pizza.

If you’re not sure that your toaster oven can or cannot cook pizza, take a look at the bottom of the cooking cavity. You should see a wide, pizza sized circle on the bottom of your toaster oven which could fit in the dish you want to eat.

Cooking a pizza that is frozen is different from cooking a pizza from scratch. Unless you like wet pizza which you can’t really pick up, you don’t want to use reheating settings to get a frozen pizza to the point where you’d want to eat it.

If you have read some of my other guides on getting the best out of your toaster oven, you will have noticed that I have generally said that using the broiling setting is the best for cooking pizza. And this is true, to an extent – if you are cooking a pizza from scratch, you want to make sure that the toppings are fully cooked and then your bread will crisp up nicely.

But if you are using a frozen pizza, you need to rethink your strategy. First of all, we don’t just want to cook the top. That’s how we get wet pizza. Yuck.

1. Using the toasting setting on your toaster oven, preheat the appliance to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. We are using the toasting setting because we want to make the toaster oven use both sets of elements. If you can cook both the top and the bottom of the pizza at the same time, you will get an even bake.

2. Place your pizza into the cooking cavity. Depending on the size of your toaster oven (and the pizza!), you will either be able to slot it into a dedicated toaster oven pizza slot or simply place it onto the grill. If you are doing the latter, use a baking tray to avoid the pizza toppings and cheese dripping onto your toaster oven bottom and elements.

3. Set your toaster oven timer. You don’t want this to be much longer than the recommended cooking time for a pizza in a conventional oven. For a pizza, I like to add 5 to 10 minutes to the total cooking time. Then periodically check the pizza as it cooks and you’ll be sure that you are not burning your dinner.

4. Take your pizza out of the oven and you are ready to eat.

If you have done all that, you can now bake a frozen pizza in your toaster oven. Easy.

Reheating a pizza is a lot easier. Really, there isn’t a high bar for what I can consider “good reheated pizza” because microwaved pizza is so often not very pleasant. Thankfully, toaster ovens can give you nice, even cooks on your pizza without too much effort.

1. Taking your pizza, make sure that you can fit all the pieces you want to reheat onto a baking tray. Don’t overload the tray or it will take longer than you need.

2. Set your toaster oven to the toasting set. We don’t want to use the broiling setting here because we want every piece of pizza to be cooked evenly. No one wants burnt pepperoni and cold bread.

3. Set the appliance to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. This is lower than for cooking other dishes because we don’t want to burn them!

4. Allow the toaster oven to preheat (for between 5 and 10 minutes, depending on the model) and pop your pizza into the cooking cavity. Because we are not cooking an entire pizza, you should be able to fit this onto the grill. This is true even for smaller toaster ovens.

5. When 10 minutes have passed, check on your pizza. It shouldn’t need too long because we are only heating it back through.

6. Take your pizza out of the toaster oven and there is your delicious snack.

Generally, no. To be honest, I’m not sold on these kitchen additions. My toaster oven is not the biggest one available on the market, but I’m not sure that I would be able to fit a pizza stone into my device.

If you want to buy a pizza stone, make sure that you have one which will fit into your toaster oven. Also, try not to buy one which is made out of a particularly heavy material. The grills in toaster ovens aren’t strong enough to hold up extremely heavy weights.

Making pizza in a toaster oven is really easy, regardless of whether you want to bake a pizza from scratch, a frozen pizza, or just reheat yesterday’s tea. If you want to get the most out of your toaster oven, you will need to understand how the different settings can help you make great pizza.

If you are cooking from scratch, use the broiling setting. You want those toppings to cook!

If you are cooking from frozen, you use the toasting set. Cooking it on both sides is key, otherwise, your pizza will be wet, undercooked, and otherwise just rather unpleasant.

If you are just reheating a few slices, use the toasting setting and a low cooking temperature. Then you won’t burn your delicious snacks.