I would note the parent comment appeared to have been talking about an open faced sandwich, i.e. cheese topping on a slice of toast.

Even if I'm incorrect and a closed grilled cheese sandwich was the culprit, a toaster oven would still be a better suggestion in my opinion!

A toaster oven, or even a conventional oven with a broiler setting.

Using a real oven for this is kind of a massive waste of energy. I got a smallish countertop convection oven and it's basically replaced nearly all uses I previously had for a small toaster oven and our proper mounted oven that takes 8 million years to preheat, along with a good chunk of microwave uses. The big one only gets used for really big stuff now, maybe once every few months at most.

Dunno man, mine takes less then 5 minutes to get to about 150°c. I never measured it but just activating it before I take a pizza from the freezer is enough time to get it fully preheated. It really depends on the quality of the oven i think. There isn't that much more Air to heat so the wasted energy is less then you'd intuitively expect. And regular sandwich irons take at least as much energy, because it's not an enclosed space, consequently bleeding a lot of energy into the room

Your oven is miraculous compared to every fixed oven I've ever had access to.

At any rate we're talking about toast here and an oven broiler only has one setting (usually): all the way on, so you're using as much energy as it takes to brown a steak just to crisp up a bit of bread.

It's not really about heating up the air, anyways, toasters and broilers mostly directly heat things. A toaster (or toaster oven or countertop convection) just has the elements closer so can direct more energy into the bread and less to.. everything else.

Toaster ovens and toasters are at most 1800W appliances. Typical electric oven elements are in the 3000-3500W range. If you're broiling, toaster ovens are much more efficient.

Ovens I've used take roughly 15minutes to warm to 400F (200C), regardless of if they are electric or gas.

How many times can you run that oven before you spent the energy required to produce the toaster oven? I'd bet it's in the thousands.

If you apply the same anti-consumption calculation to everything in life I applaud you wholeheartedly.

That said, you can buy a toaster oven for $30 from Walmart, and that cost covers the energy, material, transportation, and labour, plus markups at each stage. If you assume a $0.10/kWh energy cost, you might have at absolute most 100kWh of energy used in manufacture. That puts the oven/toasteroven breakeven point from an energy perspective at no more than about 60 hours of heating element usage.

When I was reading the GP comment, I immediately thought of the Dualit toaster. I'm not at all affiliated with them, but I own the classic as well as this sandwich cage and I cannot recommend it enough. They are expensive, but user-serviceable parts means that everything broken can be easily replaced from the logic board to the heating elements.

I think we should support companies that not only support right to repair, but look towards quality and longevity of their products. Dualit makes the case. Bonus points that their classic series are hand built in-house!

It's a fun idea, but I must say I have discovered quite by chance that an inexpensive toaster oven is the tool for this job - as well as countless other jobs.

Not just toasting bruschetta - it's secretly a $60 patio oven, opening the door to things like baking fish mid-July without heating or smelling up the house.

This is my take. Mid 40s and I’ve never owned a toaster in my adult life, but the toaster oven gets frequent use. However I don’t make plain toast ever. I suppose if I did, especially in the AM, I’d see the appeal.

I still don't see the appeal, what's the advantage of the non-oven toaster? Maybe it is quicker or something? But the toaster oven is a timed device anyway, just run it while the water is boiling for coffee...

Upright toaster is very quick and low risk of burning even when left unattended. I my experience, that timed example falls apart unless you're right there to take it out of the oven. I don't drink coffee so have no reason to hang out in the kitchen. I'd start it then go to my room and get dressed and return to my toast on my own time. However, my toaster oven behaves like a real oven and holds heat even when the elements turn off, I'd have to do a lot of experimentation to figure out the right time/temp setting. Figuring out the desired setting on a upright is incredibly easy. Once set, it's set and forget. You just push the button, walk away, return when you want to eat your toast.

Toaster's smaller and easier to clean. Quicker to start, if only slightly. Probably faster. Wouldn't be surprised if they're more power efficient per slice of finished toast. Toaster oven, being large and having so much functionality overlap with a normal stove (and microwave, to some extent), is far less common (at least in the US) than the smaller and more focused toaster. Most two-slice toasters you can easily stuff in a drawer or cabinet. Toaster ovens demand permanent counter space.

Non-oven toaster is better at making toast. They do a more even job on both sides. Toaster ovens never quite get it right and bread placement is finicky, too close to the door and it often doesn't brown well especially in cheap models. I still use a toaster oven because it's more versatile but it IS worse at making toast.

Takes up way less space!

Has way less utility! Jk, this is a valid point, I just happen to have plenty of space so this isn't a factor for me

Never owned a toaster. If I want toast I just do it in a pan. It surprises me how many people don't realize you can just use a pan.

I think it’s likely those people just don’t want toast bad enough that they’d be willing to cook it that way. Juice isn’t worth the squeeze type thing.

Meanwhile if you’re in the cohort that enjoys homemade toast, enough very infrequently, you almost immediately find value in owning even a $10 toaster.

Yeah I'm pretty confused as to why people are suggesting all toasters with super-dupe sandwich cage thingies. Why care about the orientation of your food while it is toasting?

It's easier to evenly heat a vertical slice of bread, for one. Most times I've used a toaster oven I've ended up with one side cooked much more than the other. Plus a horizontal toaster oven takes up a lot more counter/cabinet space, which is at a premium in a lot of kitchens. (I don't have a fancy toaster or fancy sandwich accessories, but I do really like the idea of multiple-use appliances.)

Generally I'm salty at people going full sales mode. But this time? I'm not even mad

Sandwich cages are the kind technological solution people in general just have something of a blind spot against. Made myself a note if I decide to buy a toaster when I move next year

Ah, the wonders of technology and engineering :)

But DOES IT MAKE FRACTAL PATTERNS ON THE TOAST?!?

If it doesn’t, all it takes is a microwave transformer. EASY!

Oh look, my channel now has 200k subs! Cool.

How do you deal with the dripping cheese part? I’m guessing a tray at the bottom you need to clean?

Removable stainless steel tray at the bottom of the toaster. The metal panels that the toaster rests on are easily accessible too. It doesn't have a spring-loaded "pop", but rather there's a lever on the side of the toaster to lift or lower the toast.

it is closer to a panini maker that you'd think... lets call it a poor mans panini even if it isn't very cheap.

The cage is very stiff and squeezes the slices very tightly together. So get the bread thickness and filling right, and it doesn't drip much/at all, and the slices will stick together. Crusts help. So it's not unlike a dedicated panini/sandwich toaster.

It's not perfect, a dedicated device is worth it if you're going to use it a lot and/or you have the counter space.

It’s explained on the website.

I've been looking for a toaster that works as well as the ones made 60 years ago. And for once, a marketing page has me convinced to pry open my wallet.

But there is no link or button anywhere on the page that tells me how to buy one. :(

In the UK, you can find Dualit stuff in stores that have a kitchen appliance section (John Lewis, say). I've seen them in shops in Germany and the Czech Republic, too. Not sure where you're based, though. Mind you, there is a little shopping trolley icon at the top right corner of the page ...

Or the site map has "shop" listed:

https://www.dualit.com/products

Don't know if that's international or just UK. A basic search shows Dualit stuff at Target and Home Depot, though. Amazon, too.

While a nice looking toaster, and supposedly good, I could buy 10 cheap toasters, each lasting up to 10 years, for the same price as one of these.

It is at this point I realised my toaster oven is fine, for that once a week serving of toast.

Now, if they had a 30 yr parts warranty, or some such, at least I'd feel semi-secure..

They're engineered for restaurants so they're absolute overkill for any home use. Your home toaster isn't going to successfully pump out 400 slices of toast per hour.

They're engineered for home use, that's why they are sold at home depot, on amazon, and in retail outlets.

Restaurants buy proper commercial gear, from hospitality supply depots. You don't buy restaurant ovens, and gear, from amazon or home depot. A strong tell is, restaurants aren't looking for candy red, enamel coated stuff. They want stainless, and their gear is hidden away in the kitchen, and they don't want to pay a penny more for trend.

Honestly, why would you say that? There is nothing about this that is commercial.

A 30 yr parts warranty is what tells people it's actually well engineered.

Why can’t you buy industrial appliances from amazon? They sell some of the same items (I didn’t go through everything) that restaurant supply does.

https://a.co/dHB5rSm

Maybe not for 400 slices an hour but Dualit toasters are stainless and pretty standard issue at cafes and bed and breakfasts in the UK.

They may have a commercial line, but that's not what you get on Amazon, or Home Depot, with its 15 candy colors and consumer facing build.

If cafes are buying a toaster at home depot, they're doing it wrong. Most retail equipment even specifies warranty is void for commercial use.

Searching for "Dualit toaster" on Amazon brings up their classic line as the first result. While available in a range of colours both the four and six slice versions are advertised as "Built for commercial use." https://www.dualit.com/products/original-toasters

My aunt had the six slice version rated for 240 slices an hour when she ran a bed and breakfast. I've also seen the four slice one in smaller cafes. All in the polished stainless steel finish of course.

I want to give a shoutout to a similar but much nerdier design, which is no longer sold. Kenmore (rebadged as De'Longhi) used to make a single long-slot toaster with an adjustable width all the way out to about 2 inches. I have one. The heat element isn't amazing, and it, like the Dualit, is manual lift with a timer. But critically, you can move the toaster elements manually together or away from one another with a lever on the top of the toaster. In other toasters, the elements are fixed in position regardless of the bread width. As a result, this toaster is amazing for big thick hand-cut slices of bread. And no need for a sandwich cage at all: you can put entire hoagies in there.

A picture: https://www.lowes.com/pd/De-Longhi-2-Slice-Aluminum-Toaster/...

The clockwork timer on mine broke, so I bought a replacement and repaired it.

I bought it in Europe so it was 220v. When I moved to the US I purchased 110v heater elements and swapped them out.

It's metal, held together with screws, and toasts bread. It's perfect.

Ha. I knew the influencers would eventually make their way to Hacker News.

But seriously won't the cheese drip out the bottom?

The cage holds the bread slices together, creating more friction for the cheese to counter the gravitational force. So somewhat surprisingly, little if any cheese drips out.

This morning I was making toast in my cheapo toaster and was reminded of the Dualit a customer brought in last year for me to repair. The date code was 1997 and it sounded like it was the first heating element replacement it had needed in that time. I thought the one side/two side heating element switch was particularly clever.

Honestly I was just impressed that the parts were available. Most consumer-grade toasters use nearly-identical mechanisms, with zero available replacement parts (maybe a crumb tray if you're lucky).

Considering their two-slice toaster I just looked up is $300, it better have repair parts available for the next, IDK, 50 years at least, not to be a complete rip-off. I expect I'll go through a half-dozen toasters in my life, and probably won't spend that much total (inflation adjusted).

That was the same conclusion I came to. I replaced my $20 toaster from 2015 with nearly-identical $30 toaster in 2020. I had looked into a lot of options to avoid the unified toaster box mechanism, including building my own, and eventually decided that the value proposition just wasn't there (especially considering how infrequently I make toast).

Right, I'm sure it's worth it for someone who's really into toast, and I get the whole buy-it-for-life thing, but I try to be a little selective about what I go that hardcore with, and a toaster doesn't pass that test for me. Shit, that's almost a quarter of what I recently paid for an entire stove, or about half the price of the cheapest stove that store had.

Conventional toasters are so cheap it makes no sense to try to repair them. Plus they aren't built to be repaired at all. When my last one died I tried taking it apart to see what went wrong (element burned through as it turned out) and see if I could fix it, but the whole mechanism was basically as single piece put together with spot welds and rivets, and with part markup being at least 2x or 3x initial cost there would be no way repairing it would make sense. I could gripe about it being cheap junk designed to fail, but it lasted over 20 years and browned thousands of slices of bread.

If some well built toaster that won't fail costs more than 4 times what the cheap toaster does, then it probably doesn't make sense to buy it. Especially if you can't guarantee that the well built toaster will actually last a lifetime.

If it cost only 4 times as much I'd probably consider it, but 10+ is just a really hard sell unfortunately. I had to scrap a perfectly good toaster because I couldn't find a replacement for a cracked plastic part that is supposed to make or break contact in a switch and engage the electromagnet. It would still toast fine if you held down the lever, and it pained me to toss it, but I couldn't source or fabricate a safe replacement part.

I'm sure the manufacturer(s) don't want to worry about self-service causing house fires though, and it costs a lot to create, maintain, and distribute a stock of replacement parts for what ultimately is a disposable appliance. I just wish I could find a solid basic consumer/prosumer toaster in the sub-$100 range.

Replacing tiny broken plastic parts is the main reason I now own a 3D printer. Granted, a toaster is one of those places where the relatively low melting point of PLA or PETG might be an issue, but it is still very useful to be able to fabricate replacement parts that are otherwise impossible to find.

Even better is how I can redesign the replacement part so it doesn't fail in the same way next time.

In theory you want anything with a finite lifespan to not need any repairs or maintenance during its lifespan and only fail once its lifespan has been exceeded.

Repairing isn't supposed to make sense, you get the next, better iteration of the product.

In practice, products fail way too early and for easily avoidable reasons justifying the need for repairs.

> There is no automatic pop-up function

That's a bit too low tech for me, but otherwise looks like a solid device :D

Presumably it does turn off on it's own.

Yes, when the clockwork timer runs down.

Even with the cage I'd be worried that the content could still slip into the toaster.

I'll keep using my toaster-oven for that.

They sell uncaged vertical toasters?!?!?

There's no electrocution risk with that?

No.

Also it's incredible difficult to touch the elements even if you wanted to: there is a mylar sheet covering them (and they are behind a cage...).

See:

https://assets.dualit.com/images/landscapehalf/50027-classic...

Yeah. Using literally any other normal method seems much safer and cleaner than that idea.

Er, Dualit is British:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualit

"Dualit Limited, Registered office County Oak Way, Crawley, West Sussex RH11 7ST. Registered in England".

If you follow the link and go to the bottom, it says "Registered in England", so... no.