Instead, it looks like a cheap countertop appliance from the 1980s, the kind of toaster Marty McFly might have used to make a quick breakfast before zipping off to class on his skateboard. In that spirit, let me tell you that you can do a lot better than the Hamilton Beach Classic Chrome 2-Slice Toaster. At 30 bucks, and with no distinguishing features to speak of, it’s about as ho-hum as toasters come. Shop around — there’s better bang for your breakfast buck. Nobody wants to waste time thinking about toasters, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want one that works well sitting on our kitchen counter. To that end, the CNET Appliances team is here to help.
Today’s toaster oven does more than just make slices of toast and bake frozen pizza! This one appliance is versatile enough to air fry, bake, broil, hamilton beach mixer warm, and some models even have rotisserie capabilities! Once you discover everything it can do, you’ll wonder what you ever did without one.
This simple model toasts bread very evenly in both slots and on both sides of the bread. However, you must use the highest setting to make golden brown toast from white sandwich bread. None of the presets chars white sandwich bread, so if your bread takes longer to toast or you like it well done, you’ll have to run another cycle. Fortunately, its preset cycles don’t take as long as some toasters’. In addition to unmatched practicality, Hamilton Beach® 4 Slice Toasters are attractive, durable and easy to use. Plus, our toasters equipped with automatic shutoff, toast boost and a removable crumb tray for easy cleanup.
Temperature controls and an automatic toaster shutoff add convenience, and a removable crumb tray makes cleaning easy. The Toastation® is compact and easy to use, making it a perfect fit for a busy countertop. Hamilton Beach Classic 4-Slice Toaster makes 2 and 4 slices, bagel, wide toast. Evenly Toasts Single Slice With the Sure-Toast technology, you get perfectly toasted bread, with balanced color and texture on both sides, even when toasting a single slice.
You put the bread in, you select the desired doneness, you press the lever down, you wait a minute or two. For what it’s worth, the lever mechanism never stuck or gave me any difficulty throughout dozens of tests, and the crumb tray was cooperative, too. We toasted just one slice of large white bread in each model, aiming for medium brown toast. I got the below response when I polled my colleagues to ask how I should go about putting a $30 toaster into context. Breakfast foods don’t get much more ubiquitous than toast — and that makes toasters relevant to just about all of us.
Some toasters housing are all plastic, some are all metal or a combination of the two. Typical metal surfaces are chrome and stainless steel. Reflects the ease of cleaning the toaster exterior and crumb tray. Ease of Cleaning is excellent when a toaster has smooth surfaces, no crevices, seams, joints or spaces to trap dirt & crumbs. The crumb tray is accessible and slides out smoothly. There really isn’t a whole lot to say about the usability of this toaster.
Its wide slots are perfect for everything from this slices to small breads, waffles and English muffins. The Hamilton Beach 2 Slice Toaster with Extra-Wide Slots is a simple, budget-friendly toaster. Even though its slots aren’t particularly wide, they can fit thicker slices of bread and lift high enough for you to grab smaller items like English muffins without burning yourself. It has a dial with seven preset settings but no bagel setting to help prevent burning the bottom of your bagel. The Toastation® Toaster and Oven switches easily from toaster to oven — slide the lever and the toaster slot is sealed, trapping heat for baking.
Hamilton Beach® 2 Slice Toasters are popular not only for their expert toasting performance — they also look great in your kitchen. Wider slots and smart buttons allow you to uniformly toast and warm bagels, English muffins and other breads, and advanced toasting technology ensures consistent results with each use. Payment methods other than a credit card may resultin an order cancellation & a refund may be issued. If the requestedexchange is no longer available, including items on waitlist and advance order,HSN will issue a refund and not deduct the HSN Return Label fee. The Hamilton Beach 2-Slice Toaster with Extra-Wide Slots is a simple 2-slot toaster. Most of its settings toast bread pretty lightly, so if your chosen bread takes longer to toast, you’ll probably have to push it down again after the first cycle.
Other toasters might offer less — the $100 Cuisinart CPT-440 offers just seven, for instance. If you’re wondering if this gives Hamilton Beach an advantage, consider that nine settings doesn’t necessarily mean nine distinct, usable settings. That classic appeal only gets you so far, though, and gets undercut by ugly, black plastic trim and cheap red LEDs. It isn’t “classic” in the 1950s sense, as some might hope (KitchenAid does a much better job of capturing that period’s design aesthetic).
The top third or so definitely gets hot enough to burn (it is a toaster, after all), but I was still able to touch the body of the appliance without scalding myself. If anything, that puts a stronger emphasis on design, and indeed, you’ll find toasters of every size, shape, and color trying their best to stand out from the crowd. A well-designed toaster should make your kitchen look a little classier, or perhaps a little cooler. Despite a slight degree of Brave Little Toaster-esque charm, I can’t say that the Classic Chrome does it for me. GE Profile’s sleek design and quality engineering will give your kitchen the most up-to-date look and the best innovative performance you’ve been looking for.