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. The other two settings—bagel and defrost—worked as expected. The bagel setting cooks just the inside of the bread, leaving the exterior warm but not overly crisp. The defrost setting helps to crisp up frozen foods, and I found that it was particularly useful when cooking frozen waffles. The toaster also allows you to push its lever up to raise the slots, which made it significantly easier to grab smaller items without the risk of burning your fingers.
Sure, on the one hand, it’s nothing special — but what are you really expecting from a $30 toaster? So long as it isn’t a horrendous failure, it’s tough not to be more or less happy with the thing. The Classic hamilton beach toaster Chrome doesn’t really excel at anything — but it doesn’t have any notable weak spots, either. That sort of middling performance actually makes it a safe bet, but not one that’s easy to get excited about.
Finally, there’s the cancel button, which just cancels the cycle—something usually achieved by lifting the toaster’s lever. The length of time the toaster is covered by its manufacturer for defects or repairs. We looked at the top Toasters and dug through the reviews from some of the most popular review sites. Through this analysis, we’ve determined the best Toaster you should buy. The Hamilton Beach Classic Chrome Toaster sports a shiny, chrome-bodied build and a fair amount of classic appeal. On bright side, once we learned the subtleties of this oven, we were consistently able to produce frozen meals that were acceptably cooked.
How well the toasters or toaster ovens produced both very light toast and very dark toast. 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. It might seem like a hard task to find your perfect Hamilton Beach toaster oven, but we’ve done our research.
We found the same heating map inconsistency when toasting bagels. The oven is only big enough to toast two full bagels at a time. The half-bagel slices in the front toasted perfectly, while those in the rear of the oven were paler and less crispy. hamilton beach toaster oven Overall, we gave the Easy Reach higher than average marks for toasting and feel it does an acceptable job with this metric. When compared to all of our other cooking and baking tests, we feel the Easy Reach 4-Slice is best at toasting.