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.
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 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.
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).
If you’re interested in accessing Newegg API service, please submit a request. Provides the option to toast on just one side, such as the cut side of a bagel. A long slot that holds two pieces of bread side-by-side. Reflects how easy the controls are to set and how clear they are. The Hamilton Beach Classic Chrome 2-Slice Toaster is tricky to criticize.
You put the bread in, you select the desired doneness, you press the lever down, you wait a minute or two. For what it’s worth, the lever mechanism never stuck or gave me any difficulty throughout dozens of tests, and the crumb tray was cooperative, too. We toasted just one slice of large white bread in each model, aiming for medium brown toast. I got the below response when I polled my colleagues to ask how I should go about putting a $30 toaster into context. Breakfast foods don’t get much more ubiquitous than toast — and that makes toasters relevant to just about all of us.
Most people will just be happy if theirs isn’t burnt. If that sounds like you, then you’ll probably be perfectly happy with what hamilton beach toaster your thirty bucks gets you here, performance-wise. Fingertips intact, I started taking a closer look at the toast I was making.