In recent years, the toaster has undergone a fashion makeover. Manufacturers of this humble one-trick pony haven’t been focusing so much on technological innovation as on style, hoping you’ll be inspired to replace yours with a newer model.
“Design has been a major catalyst” of sales, according to HomeWorld Business, a trade publication. But design also costs. Some models run more than $200 and might coordinate with larger stainless-steel appliances from the same manufacturer.
Unfortunately, some high-style, high-priced toasters we tested performed worse than inexpensive brands like Proctor-Silex and a host of toasters that cost $60 or less. Among toaster ovens, the reverse was true: The priciest, at $200 and $120, worked best. Still, two models costing far less did nearly as well.
Additional results from tests of two-slice toasters and toaster ovens include the following:
Toaster ovens do more but don’t toast as well. All the toaster ovens will melt a cheese sandwich; most will broil a hamburger or roast a 4-pound chicken. Some will even roast that chicken by convection, which can shave about 20 minutes off the cooking time. But toaster ovens generally don’t toast bread as well as toasters do. They leave tiger stripes on one side, and they take longer to do the job--4 to 6 minutes compared with 2 to 3 minutes for toasters, on a medium setting.
The best toasters excel at basics. They provide not only a wide range of browning--very light to very dark--but also consistent color in all the slices of a batch. The best also keep the same color for consecutive batches. (Less-adept toasters cause batches to get darker or lighter over time.)
You can’t always believe claims. A few toaster ovens have infrared heating, which is supposed to speed cooking. Although the infrared models made toast as fast as toasters did, some had lackluster performance on other basic tasks.
Some toaster-oven makers assert that their products accommodate six slices of bread, but they do so only if the slices are small. (Toaster ovens that are able to fit six 4x4-inch slices of bread are noted in
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