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The Smeg Retro Style Aesthetic 2-Slice Toaster is well-built and produces evenly browned baked goods. The retro design is available in nine color choices to match your kitchen decor. The Hamilton Beach Extra-Wide Slot 2-Slice Toaster is our budget-friendly pick. Eva (she/her) is a reviews analyst in the Kitchen Appliances and Innovation Lab, where she tests kitchen gear, home appliances and culinary innovations.
The lever has a high-lift feature to help you retrieve smaller pieces of bread without burning your fingers. There’s a knob that adjusts the darkness of the toast and buttons that let you select the mode or cancel the toast cycle. The knob’s settings are accurate, which means setting the dial to 3 will produce toast that’s golden brown. They also have buttons to reheat and defrost your toast, as well as a bagel setting.
Home Toaster Oven #3:
We set the toaster on the medium heat level and toasted a slice of white bread. We checked for evenness on both sides of the bread, as well as for burn marks. If you’re using smaller slices you’ll need to be careful when removing from the Cuisinart Classic CPT-180 toaster, as the low lifting height doesn’t leave much room to grab when your toast is finished. That being said, this is a somewhat reasonably priced toaster with four slots which makes it perfect for a family. The toaster has just one slot, even though it is long enough to fit two slices of bread. If you have two pieces of longer bread – such as sourdough – you might not be able to fit more than one slice in the slot at a time.
We took turns browning large slices of grocery store white bread, chunky plain bagels and dense white gluten-free bread to understand the strength of the heating elements. We liked the digital-countdown feature on the All-Clad TJ822D51 Digital 2-Slice Toaster, but the heating elements weren’t consistently illuminated, and the bottom edges of our bread didn’t get fully toasted. This model isn’t weighted as much as some of the others we tested, so if you apply too much pressure when pressing down the lever, the entire toaster tips forward. Signe Brewster and Michael Sullivan have used the Breville toaster in their homes since about October 2018 and March 2018, respectively, and both report that it’s still working well. Signe said, “It’s easy to clean, looks great, and has well-designed buttons.
Toaster oven specs
We used Wonder bread—which is practically engineered to toast evenly—for our back-to-back tests, following the same procedure used by the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers. However, some of our long term testers were frustrated by uneven results. Upon retesting, we found the Cuisinart still performed as well as it did during our earlier tests, but it was important to adjust settings for different items . For instance, English muffins had the most decent color on settings 5.5 to 7, while bagels reached a nice golden brown between settings 2.5 and 3.5. Finding the optimal settings for each carb will vary depending on your preferences, so it will take some trial and error to find out what you like best. We’ve tested multiple models of both Cuisinarts over the years, and they consistently toasted evenly from top to bottom and slot to slot, even after we made back-to-back batches.
For example, a cancel button will allow you to stop toasting if you start to smell smoke. And a bagel setting can preserve chewiness by dialing back the heat on the outer part of the bagel while warming the cut side with more-intense heat. That said, we recommend seeking out toasters with settings that are most useful to you, since more circuitry can increase the price while also introducing more possible points of failure. Toaster ovens, which can even handle some tasks intended for full-size ovens , are a more-versatile and capable appliance than two- or four-slot toasters (and they don’t seem as prone to failure).
What to consider when choosing the best toaster for you
It also has reheat, defrost, and one-sided toasting settings for bagels and English muffins. The wide slots fit bagels easily, and thin bread self-centers for easy toasting. The crumb tray is made of sturdy stainless steel, and the toaster's non-slip feet keep it steady on the counter. While this does pop the toast up automatically, there’s no lift feature to raise the toast higher, so you may need wooden tongs to retrieve particularly hard-to-reach bread slices. The removable crumb tray and included brush make cleaning easy when toast is particularly crumby. It weighs about 32 pounds, and at 21 inches wide by 17 inches deep by 11.5 inches high, the stainless steel appliance was among the larger toaster ovens we tested.
It easily wiped clean, more energy efficient and perfectly toasted. The DASH Mini Toaster Oven Cooker is a perfect addition to your kitchen with its easy-to-use digital timers that allow you to specify how long you want your bread or bagels to toast. It will also automatically shut off once toast has been made so cleanup is a breeze. This toaster was one of the few that began to crisp the edges of our toast even at lower settings. The gluten-free bread didn’t want to release, even with the pop-up assist, as easily; it had a good crunch and color but a black band of char across the top, where it had overheated slightly. The bagels had a nice, even browning, although they were slightly compressed by the cage inside the toaster.
The trays that came with the Hamilton Beach and GE Toaster remained the most stained after a minute of cleaning, with the rest falling somewhere in the middle. Though usually the Breville Mini Smart Oven is priced at $160, which is about $10 dollars more than the FlashXpress generally sells for, it's easy to find it on sale. It also weighs 15 pounds, which is twice as much as the FlashXpress, but still by no means heavy.
Gorgeous looks aside, the Alessi Plissé Toaster is neat and compact while still making a statement. It has two slots, and there are six browning levels for perfect toast every time. Simplicity is key here, so while you will not have large dials and Smeg-style funky button controls, there is everything you need to defrost, reheat, or cancel your setting. The levers have some added lift, which is great for pop tarts and other smaller toasted goods, but it doesn't have the added lift of some other toasters, so it's not the best for seriously small slices. It's easy to select your chosen setting, be it Bagel, Reheat, or Defrost. It's also possible to choose from 12 brownness settings, with up to 6 notches as well as halves for the extra picky members of your family.
The tray is able to slide in either near the top or the bottom but not in the center of the oven, which does cause some top-to-bottom unevenness, but it wasn't enough to really bother me. But if you need something fast and don't want to spend much, the small yet mighty Comfee is a solid budget toaster option. This is the future of toasters, with a lever-free design that lowers and lifts toast automatically and an audible alert when the toast is done. The LCD screen includes a countdown, so you can see at a glance how soon you’ll have toast to butter. With a streamlined black matte design and unobtrusive, simple controls aligned across the bottom of the appliance’s front panel the KitchenAid Countertop Oven with Air Fry is an instant standout on style.
The rounded white plastic toaster effectively fits four bagel halves yet takes up the least amount of counter space of any four-slice toaster we tested. It is as compact as the name suggests, equivalent in size to the two-slice models from Oster and Dualit. If you’re buying with sustainability as a top priority, and you have the counter space, you should probably consider a toaster oven instead. They typically last longer, which may be in part because the heating elements are enclosed or better protected by metal guards to prevent damage.
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