Preparing breakfast has never been easier with this Hamilton Beach toaster. The Hamilton Beach Classic Chrome Toaster sports a shiny, chrome-bodied build and a fair amount of classic appeal. Our goal is to help people improve their lives at home by providing quality appliances that were made for real life.
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.
Toaster ovens are countertop appliances designed for cooking meats, pizza and other food items with a smaller space than a traditional oven. So long as there’s a nearby power source, you can bake and cook meals on any surface in your home or office. The higher the oven’s wattage, the more power it uses, equating to faster heat-up times. Easily toast artisan breads and bagels with this Hamilton Beach 2-slice toaster.
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.
It combines space efficiency on your countertop with versatility. Consider a convection toaster oven to bake all your food items with proper heat circulation. Certain ovens have rotisserie spits to thoroughly cook whole chicken or turkey.
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 hamilton beach toaster 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).
A cool-touch exterior makes them especially family-countertop friendly. These designed-to-perform toasters are just as smart on the inside, too, with automatic toast boost and auto shutoff, as well as wide slots to toast a delicious morning bagel. Most small toaster ovens come with many hamilton beach mixer features found in larger ovens — just with simpler settings and controls. Go with a manual oven to make your adjustments using a number of dials for customized cooking. For easy presets, choose a digital oven with a series of buttons and cook or bake what you need with a few beeps.
Easily Retrieve Smaller Breads Auto Boost automatically lifts smaller breads like English muffins and gluten-free bread slices so they’re easier to retrieve after toasting. Why take up valuable counter space with a toaster and an oven, when the Hamilton Beach® Toastation® Toaster and Oven combination does it all? The top slot works like a traditional toaster with two or four extra-wide slots, and the spacious oven is perfect for pizza, French fries, chicken nuggets and more. How well the toasters or toaster ovens produced both very light toast and very dark toast. Hamilton Beach® 4 Slice Toasters incorporate wide slots to accommodate bagels and slices of homemade bread. Not only do they toast evenly, optional smart functions allow you to reheat and defrost, too.
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 hamilton beach mixer 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.
I tested them all out, and came away more or less satisfied with the results. Nothing was ever totally even, but it wasn’t ever badly overtoasted or undertoasted, either. As toasters go, the Classic Chrome is perfectly average — and maybe that’s all you want or need. For manual toasting, you get a smooth-turning doneness dial arbitrarily marked with nine settings.