Goatmoose

We’ve finally broken in another small appliance.  I know I said the next review would likely be a dutch oven or some pots/pans – but I lied.  I’ve used them all, but simply didn’t feel like writing about them yet.  So, you get a toaster!

The Hamilton Beach SmartToast 4 Slice Toaster is a wide-slot toaster with a few fancy settings.  It comes in stainless and black versions.  From the picture, your clever mind can figure out which one I own.

Right out of the box, it works like a toaster.  You put bread in it, and it comes out as toast.  This is a good thing.

I’ve read some other reviews that say the thing stops working after about 6 months, or starts dropping the handles on its own and starting up the heating elements.  One of the things I like about this toaster is how easy it is to lower the handles – on that same token, it does make the claims about the handles dropping themselves more believable.  They do move very easily, so if their mechanisms ever weakened, I could see how that would be a possibility.

But, my toaster has yet to prove itself a fire hazard.  As such, I’m a big fan of it – especially since it upgraded us from a cheap Wal-Mart Durabrand toaster that was about $8 a few years ago.  It does a fine job of making toast without burning, and the intensity knob works well.  If you have it set to 2, you’re not going to get toast as black as a 5 when it comes out.

The toaster’s control panel has a lot of settings.  If you don’t push one, you’ll get standard toasting.  If you do, you have the option of frozen bagels, frozen toast or regular bagels.  The toaster is fancy enough to know what to do with each type of product to toast it properly straight from its frozen state.  This isn’t that useful for toast, because not a lot of people eat frozen toast, but frozen and un-frozen bagels are pretty common.

The crumb catcher trays slide out from the front and slide back in super easy.  There is no unhinging some magic door on the bottom of the toaster that drops all the crap or anything complicated.  You don’t even have to pick the toaster up off the counter to get the crumbs out.  Just slide out the tray, dump it in the trash and slide it back in.  There is one on each side and they’re just dandy.

So yeah – that’s as much as I can possibly say about a toaster.  For a gadget that runs around $35, it does a really good job and I’d recommend picking it up.  Until mine catches on fire or starts turning itself on, I’m not going to put a huge amount of stock into negative reviews.  It’s a nice-looking toaster that makes toast, and quite frankly, that’s all I could ask.