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Breville VTT213
by mrsgladwin
After my beautiful yet useless Morphy Richards toaster finally gave up working altogether we decided to invest in a new toaster. I wasn't allowed to base my purchase decision purely on what toaster looked prettiest after the Morphy Richards disaster, so we set about looking for a decent, economical, functional toaster (boring!)
We ... eventually opted for this - a Breville VTT213 4 slice toaster.
It was never going to live up to its pretty cream predecessor in terms of appearance but to be honest it's not too bad to look at. It's quite sleek and minimalistic and it would be pretty easy to buy matching appliances. It has a nice shiny silver finish which looks nice, but does need a regularly clean to remove finger marks. It's quite bulky so does take up quite a bit of room but considering it holds 4 slices and the size of the bread slots are fairly wide, that's to be expected. Despite its bulk it does have a cord storage which is handy for hiding the cord out of sight and making the counter look tidier. It's not quite as sturdy and robust as I'd hoped - if you press both levers down at the same time with too much force it tips forward, but maybe I'm just picking fault because its not cream and pretty!
The one thing that was nonnegotiable when we were looking to buy a new toaster was four bread slots and thankfully this one does have that. It's so much easier and convenient to be able to toast four pieces of bread at once rather than hanging around waiting for a two slice toaster. The bread slots are wide and great for toasting things like crumpets, teacakes or thickly cut pieces of bread. Bearing this in mind, it does take longer to toast thin slices of bread and the settings may need to be adjusted. One minor complaint is that the slots aren't quite deep enough for larger slices of bread and so the tops of the bread don't get toasted properly. We find that turning the bread mid cycle resolves this problem but its still a nuisance having to do that. We had the same problem with our previous toaster so I think it's a pretty common problem.
The toaster has the usual features you'd expect such as defrost, cancel and a timer which controls how brown you want your toast. There's only one timer for all four slots which means that you can't cant toast your bread on a different setting at the same time. I like my toast to be nicely browned whereas my husband prefers his to be barely more than warm bread, and so it would be handy to have two timer dials, one for each side of the toaster.
We have found that despite the problem with the shallow slots, the toaster does brown the bread nicely and evenly. Our old, more expensive toaster, was useless and temperamental but this one is reliable and consistent. It had 6 different browning settings, and we find that for a standard sized slice of toast settings 2 and 4 are perfect for my husband and I's varying tastes. The setting does need to be turned down for thicker slices and crumpets. As well as toasting the bread more evenly than my previous toaster, it also toasts it quicker which is great when you're in a rush in the morning.
Another handy aspect is the high lift feature which prevents you burning your fingers removing your toast from the toaster. I find that it's great for smaller pieces of bread but you still need to be careful when removing small items such as crumpets and teacakes.
It does have a reheat setting, which was one of the things I liked about our old toaster. The amount of times I've made everyone some toast and buy the time I've got everyone sat down or in their highchair my own has gone cold. The reheat feature is great for times like those.
So would I recommend it? Well yes I would. I had my doubts at first but it is much better than our previous toaster and cheaper in price too. We bought ours on offer in Tesco for around £30 and I think they're currently selling it on Amazon for a similar price. It may not be as pretty as the Morphy Richards one we had but in terms of efficiency and consistency it's a much better buy.
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Breville TR16 Easy-Clean
by nicholab85
We have had this toaster for the past year or so, up until buying this one we had a supermarket own brand one (asda I think) which never seemed to keep the cheese in the sandwich, we would end up with toast toasted sandwiches and a cheesy kitchen work top.....my dad always said you cant go wrong with a breville so we took his ... advice...best decision ever! we can actually have cheese toasties!! :D
It cost us about £20 from Argos for the two sandwich breville toaster, it was well packaged and extremely easy to use. Its simply a case of plug in and go. It features two lights, one red and one green, green meaning its up to temperature, red being its not hot enough yet. Once your sandwich is in cooking it will go red again until the sandwich is ready at which point the green light will come on again. It has a clip to keep it locked shut whilst your sandwich is cooking.
Cleaning the toaster is a doddle, the plates can be removed to be washed so no more struggling to get crispy cheese out of all the cracks and crevices!!!
All in all this is a great sandwich toaster, relatively compact, very easy to use and actually keeps your fillings inside the sandwich!!
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Breville PT47
by Flukepiestalker
We bought this toaster as it was silver and matched the rest of our kitchen appliances - it also had the rather cool looking blue LED lights to tell you how your bread was doing - great for an impatient person like me who needs to know these things. Compared with other toasters, at around £35 this seemed like it was fairly decent value ... and from a (trusted) maker we have all heard of. The slider at the bottom gives you the option to select the length of time it 'toasts' for, allowing perfect results from crumpets to bagels - or at least that's what the box said...
We bought ours from Argos, plugged it in and set the slider to about 4 and a half minutes in order to toast some crumpets. We thought they smelled 'done' before the timer went off (and all the blue lights had gone out), so we attempted to retrieve them. At this point it should be noted that the toasting slots are very deep and, despite pulling the lever up at the side up, the crumpets were still below the surface of the toaster (ie impossible to get out), so after a few 'pings' of the lever (to fire them out of the top) we managed to 'catch' our crumpets - or what was left of them. They were absolutely cremated.
We assumed that we had set the timer wrong, so to test the theory we set it to '1' - and placed some normal white bread in. Sure enough, after about 3 minutes it became clear that the timer wasn't working as the toast had not appeared - so we took it back to Argos and got a replacement.
Unfortuantely the second one we got was even worse! On only the fifth occassion of use, the toaster went *BANG*(which made my wife jump) and a puff of smoke came out of the side. The lever on the side then refused to lock in place, meaning no more toast. We gave up at this point and asked for our money back.
I don't think we were particularly taxing the toaster with our choices of bread related products - so this was very disappointing to say the least. Though whether it was the actual toaster or Argos to blame, we are not sure. Either way, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, and we now use the oven grill for toasting, which hopefully won't blow up.
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