Why can't toasters work better?

Factual Questions
1

(I really hesitated over where to put this – maybe it should be CS because it’s sorta about food but really about physics, I think so… apologies to the mod if you have to move it.)

Anyway, I’ve had multiple toasters over my life, and NONE of them have done what it seems to me like the most basic thing a toaster should do. As in, when you put a slice of bread into the thing, it should come out cooked to your desired shade of brown/crunchiness time after time after time. I mean, really, is that too much to ask for?

I finally looked up (yes, I googled it!) how toasters work. And apparently there are two types and neither can be expected to reliably do what I want. :frowning:

One group simply measures the temperature within the slot, and when it reaches some particular point it declares the toast done. And what the ‘darkenss’ control on those do is change the target temperature. Which sounds good, except that it makes a huge difference if the toaster starts out cold or hot. So the first batch of toast will be browner than another batch made soon after. So I guess what you’d need to do is create a whole lot of unsatisfying toast while you figure it out: let’s see, I need the first batch to be at 3, and the second at 6, though if it’s been two minutes maybe a 4? Or a 5, since the kitchen is rather chilly this morning it probably cooled faster…

The other kind of toasters use some magic gizmos called variable capacitors and resisters which I do not even pretend to understand, but the bottom line is that they work by time: setting the darkness control changes how fast something charges up, and when the appropriate degree of charge is reached it goes pop.

Which is supposedly consistent batch to batch… as long as you’re putting the exact same type of bread into the toaster. But the setting to get the same degree of toastedness for white bread might be quite different than for whole wheat and rye different again. And I bet how thick the slice is matters, too. And whether the loaf was baked yesterday or five days ago. And maybe the phase of the moon matters, too, I dunno.

Isn’t there a better way to do this?

My guess is that toasting bread is pretty much the same as other cooking: the heat makes certain chemical changes happen AND some amount of water evaporates. So couldn’t you have toasters check on those things instead?

Okay, chemical analysis is probably ridiculously hard (though maybe some optical sensor that detects the degree of color change?) but maybe you could detect the change in how much water is left or the rate it’s changing at or something?

I want perfect toast, dammit! If we can put a man on the moon, and all that. :mad:

2

I have had good toasters and bad toasters in my day, but my current oneseems to work about as well as any I have used. The trick to to use the same kind of bread every time and start with the bread either from the fridge or left out on the counter. In other words, reduce the variables as much as possible and your toaster should toast about the same time after time.

Have you looked at buying a commercial toaster such as those in restaurants? I would think they would be some of the most reliable and consistent ones out there.

3

Dualit make a toaster that takes into account the ambient temperature and things like how many times it has toasted, and in what time, to compensate for the heating effects. But it won’t compensate for bread type or staleness of the bread.

There is a clue here. Doing so is actually cheap - cheap once you have paid for a microcontroller to drive the toaster. But note that they don’t try to detect the colour of the toast. My suspicion is that a toaster is a very unfriendly environment to place such sensors and expect them to last any useful time. Not at a cost that your average consumer is willing to pay.

4

Perfect toast is easy. Hold the bread near a heating element and turn it periodically while you watch it to see changes in color. Move it away from the heating element when you like the color and texture.

Of course, this simple method uses the human senses, largely unconsciously, to assess the process in real time and make minute changes to the position, angle, distance from the heat, etc.

That’s a lot to replicate if you want a machine to do it for you. That’s going to be expensive.

Toasters don’t work better because, as much as we complain about them, we still keep buying them. And most of us want to spend $25-50 for a toaster, not $300.

5

Not all bread is the same. Asking a toaster to output “perfect” toast without changing any settings while using all kinds of bread (differing temperature, moisture, density, thickness, etc) is like asking to be able to put “meat” in the oven, push a button and have it come out “right.” Not beyond current technology, but probably more expensive to implement than is worth it for most consumers.

6

My parents had an old 50-60’s vintage Sunbeam (I think??) toaster that worked pretty well…when it worked. It had a sensor that reacted to the IR radiation coming from the bread, so it gave a fairly consistent toast. It should be possible to do this better with modern IR thermometer techniques, but making the electronics survive inside the toaster might be an issue.

There was a big problem with the above toaster, as it used bimetal actuators to raise and lower the toast. The weight of one slice of bread worked a switch that turned on the elements, and the contacts on that switch were not very reliable…so you often had to try multiple times to get it to accept the bread.

This is it:

The lettering on the righthand slot tells you that this is the side that has the aforementioned switch, so you have to use that side if only making one slice.

7

Using a sensor to detect the color of the toast would be racist.

8

What about toasters of colour, then? BTW, here is a top ten for your viewing pleasure. Note that none of them are $30 toasters as noted upthread

9

There’s also the issue that colors don’t actually indicate the desired level of doneness. People want some particular flavor and texture from their toast, not a particular color, and the correlation between the two depends on the kind of bread. For instance, whole wheat bread will start off darker than white bread, but will take a very long time to darken further in a toaster: Perfectly-toasted whole wheat bread is likely to not look very different from fresh.

10

There’s toasters with transparent sides. If you know the desired amount of browning for your bread, just look.

11

(Bolding mine)

That’s what I do.
I buy the same brand of bread, store it in the freezer, put it straight from the freezer into the toaster, use the same setting on my toaster … and it comes out identical every time.

12

Every toaster I’ve ever used has had a glass front door so you can look and see the progress of the toast and stop it before it gets too dark.

13

This might be the kind of case where maybe the really old-fashioned way of doing things was better, and all the modern tech doesn’t help much.

You should get a toaster like this one.

Well, yeah, you’ll have to stand there and watch your toast with an eagle-eye while it cooks, and turn it over at just the right moment, and take it out at just the right moment. But that’s sort of just what WhyNot is suggesting, above. You’ll get your toast just as perfect as you want it, every time. As long as you pay attention and don’t get distracted.

14

I use a toaster oven for all of my toasting. I can fit four to five slices of bread in it and the glass door means I can get a good look at the toast as it cooks. If the toaster is cold, I find turning it to medium, letting it go off then flipping all the toast and setting it just less than “light” gets me some really nice toast. A warm toaster is probably done without flipping or turning the nob as high. It’s pretty consistent as long as I keep track of the variables, and even if there are unknowns like frozen bread, I can still look in to check on it. Good toast every time.

15

I had no idea there was such a problem as this. I like my toast to be slightly crunchy, a tiny bit brown on the outside but hot all the way through so that the butter melts immediately and soaks in. But I never really thought about how the toaster accomplishes this amazing feat. Now I want toast.

16

This might be a difference of language-- what country are you from? In the US, the word “toaster” refers to an appliance that doesn’t have a door at all, just a couple of slots in the top each big enough for one slice of bread. It sounds like you’re describing what we Yanks call a “toaster oven”.

17

Toast has never confounded me to such an extent. I have the cheapest pop-up toaster Target had on the shelf 15 years ago and I’d score pretty high on consistency if it were a sport to be judged. The secret is… it’s not hard to see down in there. I let it cook for a minute or two then check it. If it starts to look too brown, I pull the lever up. If it pops up and it’s not brown enough, I push the lever back down.

18

Perhaps you missed it, but there was quite a hijack in this thread http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=776056&highlight=toast* about toast made in toaster ovens vice in vertical slot toasters. See post #9 et seq. Several people had never heard of the other device for making toast.

19

use a frying pan and a dab of butter

20

The struggle is real