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 hamilton beach mixer 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.
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 hamilton beach toaster 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.
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).
Additionally, the nine “settings” on the rotary dial didn’t produce nine distinct levels of doneness. I could get light toast at the lowest few settings, golden-brown toast right below medium, dark toast right above medium, and burnt toast at the highest settings. In theory, the smooth selector dial should let you hone in on any preferred level of doneness, but the Hamilton Beach just wasn’t consistent enough for that sort of exacting control. I wondered if the chrome build would get especially hot while in use. Sleek, perfectly flat metals tend to cause burns easier than coarse, brushed metal builds. Fortunately, the Hamilton Beach keeps things at a reasonable temperature.
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 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.
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.