How we picked The Best Toasters

Toasters have been around since the late 1800s, but they haven’t changed much in the past century or so. They can pop up your bread and offer bagel or frozen-bread settings now, but their core function is basically still the same. And when it comes down to it, the ideal toaster should simply toast bread evenly and consistently without a lot of fuss.

Every toaster should be able to provide similar performance. Your toaster should be able to toast breads of different types and shapes, meaning you need a toaster with a big enough slot for thick bagels and a way to retrieve small English muffins without having to jam a utensil into the slots.

In order to determine which models will be our top picks, we spoke with various experts in the field and researched the history of toasters. After compiling dozens of best-selling models on Amazon and kitchenware sites, we went through each one individually to decide which ones would be tested. Though the technology is simple, many small factors go into making a toaster that’s pleasant to use and churns out evenly browned bread every single time.

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In our research and testing, here’s what we looked for:

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1. Even toasting is the most crucial task of a toaster. The toaster should produce consistently crisp bread with no white spots or burnt edges
2. A toaster should have accurate settings, so that setting the dial to medium will give you neither ghost-white bread nor a singed black square, but rather golden-brown perfection—or something like it.
3. A good toaster should be able to toast consistently from batch to batch, regulating its temperature so that subsequent rounds of toast do not come out entirely charred. A quality appliance will heat up a bit after one round of toasting, but we recommend turning the dial down slightly when making a second batch.
4. Types of Toasters There are several types of toasters on the market. We focused on long-slot models because they can accommodate everything from a simple slice of Wonder bread to a fluffy New York bagel. At the same time, small English muffins shouldn’t get swallowed in slots that are too deep. We looked into long-slot toasters, As we think cutting longer pieces in half before toasting is an easy solution.
5. A lever can help lift toast out of the slot as well as lower it. You shouldn’t have to fish your toast out of the slots with utensils or your fingers. (This is not only dangerous, but you could easily damage the heating elements with sharp objects. We recommend using mini tongs or a pair of chopsticks to safely retrieve smaller pieces.
6. The exterior of the toaster should remain cool to the touch even after toasting, so that you don’t burn your fingers by accidentally touching it.
7. A toaster has a removable crumb tray that makes cleaning it much easier.
8. Buttons or settings can make toasting easier. For example, a cancel button lets you stop toasting if you start to smell smoke. A bagel setting preserves the chewiness of the cut side while warming the outer part with more-intense heat. But 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.​
9. A toaster should produce golden toast quickly. We found that some models were two times faster than others.
10. A toaster should be compact. As a single-use kitchen appliance, it will most likely remain on the counter and take up space.
11. Price should not be exorbitant because toasters are only meant for one purpose, and their lifespans seem shorter than that of toaster ovens. In our research, we found that many of the high-end toasters that cost upwards of $100 don’t necessarily last longer than those costing less than half the price. We recommend spending only what you might think is reasonable for getting about five years’ worth of use out of it.
12. The toaster should have well-constructed exterior parts that can handle normal wear and tear. If the levers feel flimsy or wobbly and the buttons stick or if printed text easily wears off, these are good indications that it is probably cheaply made.

In addition, there are some attributes that we found helpful but not always necessary:

1. Toaster ovens have glass walls so you can watch your toast brown. But they are more expensive and may not be better at toasting. They are great for people who use wheelchairs, because they allow them to see what’s happening inside the toaster without having to peer into it from above.
2. Motorized levers can lift and lower your toast at the press of a button, but it takes longer than just manually pressing down a lever. content: The process takes longer because you have to wait for the motor to start.
   
3. A defrost mode is meant to help frozen breads; it extends the toasting cycle, giving them some time to thaw before being toasted. In our tests, we found little difference between heating up a waffle on the frozen and normal toast settings. But every single toaster we tested had a defrost setting, so it never came up as a dealbreaker.
   
4. You can’t exactly trust any toaster to do what it’s supposed to do, and that’s make perfect toast. Even the best of them are a bit on the tricky side. The makers of these things seem to agree: All of our finalists had a cancel button, which tells us they know a thing or two about unreliable appliances.