*Picture me before you with head hanging.*

I, who cares not for labels; who cuts tags out of my clothes because they bug me, so who’s to know if it’s Anne Klein or a knock-off? (like somebody would view the tags of my clothes anyway!). My point is, I, this person who proudly shops quality rather than trendiness, bought a ‘Designer Toaster’.

For shame.

Krups. So yuppie.

*sigh*

I can absolve myself only by sharing my experience with you; you who may someday be faced with that irritating task of having to replace your toaster.

I shall begin with the end. Skip this friggin’ toaster.

It’s O.K., don’t get me wrong. It makes toast, if the term ‘toast’ is loosely defined. That is, if you’re not too picky about it being all one color or anything, and you don’t mind having some areas browner than others.

In fact, had I paid $10 or $15 for it, I probably wouldn’t even complain. Alas, I did not. I paid, *head hanging further* $50 for this contraption.

So, here we go!

Un-Eveness of Browning

I might as well pick up where I left off here. I’ve never met a piece of bread smooth enough to warrant even toasting from this toaster. Further, I’ve yet to find a slice of bread short enough to fit in sufficiently to toast the top of the bread!

I would expect uneven toasting for homemade breads, or specialty, uneven breads. This is not the type of bread about which I gripe! I’m talking plain, old, grocery store, out of the plastic, make kids’ sandwiches-type bread! Which brings me to:

Size of Toaster

It’s big. It takes up a lot of counter space. I thought the ability to toast 4 pieces at a time would be most cool.

The fact is, I discovered our family has gourmet taste in toast. Each prefers a slightly different setting, ranging from burned, (me!), to warm bread (my hubby!). The kids all fall somewhere in between. Thus, we can only do two pieces at a time anyway, to satisfy the ‘Toast Gourmets’, who have the ability to tell if the setting was at 4 vs. 5 while blindfolded.

O.K.; that’s not the toaster’s fault. It can’t help it that we like our toast ranging from rare to well-done. Yet, I can’t help but wonder why, if it’s long enough to handle 4 pieces of toast, did they not think to make it tall enough to handle the top of the toast?

Since I’m discussing the size of the toaster, I’ll move on to the;

Size of Bread it Accepts

This is a nice feature. It automatically adjusts to accommodate any width of bread. It will neatly hold the thinnest slice, and expand to hold bagels and beyond.

Unfortunately, it seems the wider the bread, the more uneven the browning!

Time

Is it just because I live in the ‘microwave era’ and toasting in general seems to take a long time? No; I know that’s not the case because my toaster oven works faster than this thing.

I cannot imagine why, but if it’s early in the morning and you’d like toast before you fall back asleep, you could be out of luck. It takes forever.

Ease of Cleaning

Not. No. Nada. There is NO ease of cleaning; not no cleaning. This thing is a P-A-I-N to clean!!!

There is something about this surface that attracts and holds grunge with a death-grip. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve seen nothing like it before. It appears to be plastic, like so many other appliances. Yet, I have a gas oven that attracts less ‘stuff’. This toaster is very tricky to clean, because I don’t want to get cleanser in the interior, yet simply wiping it off daily won’t do the trick.

I will admit the exterior stays cool, so nothing melts against it.

Of course it has a Crumb Tray.

The crumb tray is highlighted in the feature listing of the toaster as though they came up with a breakthrough idea. Is it possible to buy a toaster without a crumb tray anymore?

Oh! Lest I forget, it has the almighty;

Release Switch!

When you smell parts of your toast burning, as you often will with this toaster, you can easily press the button to enable your toast to pop up instantaneously.

Let me assure you, this button works very well!

I’m confident it is due to my lack of sophistication that I don’t understand the real difference in having a button to achieve this task. With all of my prior toasters, I just pushed the same lever up to release the toast as I did to begin the toasting process.

Sensotoast???

What’s that about??? A sensor? If so I can’t find one, or anything in the owner’s manual about one. It surely doesn’t “sense” when something’s burning.

Is it sensitive? Maybe the Sensotoast has hurt feelings as I'm talking about it.

Perhaps, it could be..., marketing??!

Hmmmm……,

Is my cynicism showing? Ouch! After all, I’m the goober that bought it! *sigh*

O.K. Catharsis complete!

Hope you're having a great day, and thanks for letting me share!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This review is brought to you by the First Official Three-Legged Write-Off, an event pairing two members of the Epinions Community running side-by-side to offer tandem reviews because it's not only fun, it supports the spirit of working together toward a common goal: providing consumers and Epinions with a wealth of information that you can find nowhere else. To read the entries from the other competitors you may wish to visit http://home.earthlink.net/~epskids/team.html.

In particular, I'm confident you'll enjoy reading the reviews by my most illustrious hatted partner, mind-full, whose writing is not only informative, but well-seasoned with wit and humour!


Recommended: No