The Best Long-Slot Toasters

Is your toaster stuck in the 1950s, when all bread was white, skinny, and square? As recently as 2017, sandwich bread made up only 17.8 percent of bread sold in America, according to market research firm Statista. Bigger, heartier loaves made up 68 percent of bread sold: 37.9 percent were “crusty/hot hearth” breads, and 30.2 percent were “artisan.” Home cooks love to bake bread, too. So why can't most toasters handle it?

The last time we tested toasters, our winner, the Magimix Vision Toaster, was unique because it had one extra-long, extra-wide bread slot that fit any kind of bread. It toasted evenly, using responsive quartz heating elements. It also boasted glass walls that let you watch your toast and a “stop” button to halt toasting at your exact browning preference. The downside? At about $250, it's a staggering investment, even for someone who's fussy about perfect toast.

But there's hope: Recently, a handful of “long-slot” toasters have appeared on the market at a range of prices. We bought eight models, including our old winner, priced from about $35 to about $250; all had one or two long, wide slots. We toasted artisan loaves, big bagels, and (of course) white sandwich bread. We tried light, medium, and dark settings and recorded the average speed of the toasting cycles. We filled the toasters to capacity and made full batches of toast in rapid succession. We checked whether the models' exteriors got too hot. Finally, we made 365 consecutive pieces of toast in each of our top three contenders to simulate a year's worth of use. The goal was efficient, consistent, uniform toasting of a variety of breads at the browning level we'd selected, with intuitive controls, easy toast retrieval, simple cleanup, and durability.

What Color Is My Toast?

When you set your toaster for light, medium, or dark browning, what do you get? Most toasters let us down. We think the lightest setting should brown a little, not just warm the bread; none of our models managed this. On the darkest setting, we want deeply browned toast, not charcoal. A few toasters burned the bread solid black, filling the kitchen with smoke. Aside from these extremes, the problem was that for most toasters, getting medium–golden brown toast was a cumbersome, lengthy process. Only two toasters gave us one-and-done, reliable browning that corresponded to the controls, without endless fiddling and retoasting.

Even if they generally hit the right color, evenness was often a problem. Some toasters gave us very patchy brown-and-white blotches across each side of a slice of bread, while others made toast that looked evenly golden on one side but completely different on t... read more