A Smarter Slice Of Toast

By Anita Hamilton

I will never eat again. It is the day after Thanksgiving, and I am seriously regretting every bite I took in the past 24 hours. Unfortunately, instead of a turkey dinner to gorge on, my holiday feast consisted solely of toast--white toast with butter, toasted English muffins with jam, toasted pumpernickel bagels with cream cheese and lox. But I know all too deep in my gut that what really put me over the edge was the toasted Pop-Tarts I had for breakfast this morning.

It all started when I saw a new toaster from Oster that offered 63 different settings. Called the Perfectionist, this $60 microprocessor-controlled box has separate calibrations for bagels, English muffins and regular bread. It reheats and defrosts. And it charts its progress on a blinking, beeping, digital pie chart you can watch while you wipe the sleep from your eyes.

Surely this must be a joke, I thought. People have been toasting bread for centuries, and they've never needed a computer to get the job done. Like answering machines, microwaves and VCRs before it, even the humble toaster seemed to have become too smart for its own good. To find out for sure, I put to the test four of the fanciest models I could find.

I soon learned that Oster's Perfectionist isn't the only toaster that asks humans to make far too many decisions before their first cup of coffee. Krups' ToastControl Digital, which sells for $70, packs in even more options, including two for saving your favorite settings, like the bookmarks on your Web browser. Two glass-sealed quartz rods replace the usual wire heating elements inside and are supposed to toast your bread faster without drying it out. A built-in digital timer tells you precisely how many seconds are left to go.

Too bad the resulting toast proved to be merely ordinary. While bagels came out nicely and white bread toasted almost evenly, both took longer to brown in the Krups than in the three other models I tried. And for some reason, frozen English muffins came out slightly soggy, even on the defrost setting.

The Perfectionist also proved less than perfect. One side of my toast tended to come out darker than the other--fine for bagels, but not for bread. And while I had 63 options for browning, the short, 20-in. cord gave me too few options for where to put the thing.

That left me with two popular older models: KitchenAid's $100 Ultra Power Plus, which comes in fun colors like green, blue and red, and Cuisinart's Custom Control Total Touch, which typically sells for $70. The KitchenAid was cute and compact, but I finally settled on the slightly bulkier Cuisinart because it consistently turned out the most evenly browned bread, bagels, Pop-Tarts and muffins with the least amount of thought or effort on my part. Now that's what I call a smart toaster--not that I'll ever get near a piece of toast again.

Questions for Anita? Send e-mail to hamilton@time.com