The Breville Die-Cast 2-Slice Smart Toasterâ„¢

The Breville Die-Cast 2-Slice Smart Toaster™ is a profoundly heavy toaster. It never skids when one is retrieving a piece of toast or inserting a piece of bread that is to become toast. And the toast! What it does to white bread, when the "toastiness" slider is set to somewhere between 3 and 4 on its 5-point infinite scale, is create a toast product that should be painted in oils to be rendered for posterity. The bread; it glows, the vertical striping is subtle but gives one that cozy, toasty feeling. What it does to Pepperidge Farm's "Jewish RYE Bread Seeded" (as it is called on the package) is exquisite; the little Jewish seeds want to pop open in the heat but do not.

If you are prone to watching your toast with some anxiety, the toaster provides a countdown on the front; its cooling little lights shrink down, from right to left, as if it were saying, "I'm toasting speedily… and the toasting is nearly complete by all my mathematical equations!"

But say that, for some reason, you have not set the slider appropriately? And your toast is somehow undertoasted? Then I refer you to the button up top that says, simply, "a bit more." YES, it will toast it just a bit more for you.

Are you not sure if it does need a bit more? Then you simply depress the "lift and look" button, and your toast emerges, with its intentionally dramatic mechanized slowness (sort of like the helicopter in Miss Saigon?), for your investigation.

The bagel setting, I needn't say, is perfection. (Although I also use it for English muffins, which I hope is allowed.)

I have never yet used it to defrost but I will report back to you in short order!

Just recently I was in the other room from the toaster, and I recalled that I had inserted some bread in the toaster. I wonder if my toast is done yet?, I thought. And then the toaster issued its just-loud-enough, not particularly harmonious, but absolutely intelligible "your toast is done!" beep. I could hear it perfectly, yet it was not loud enough to upset the jumpy.

My toast consumption has increased three-fold since the Breville Die-Cast 2-Slice Smart Toasterâ„¢ has come into my life. My only regret is that I do not have the 4-Slice Smart Toaster™, and can only toast two slices at once.