Togress design has not really changed in the 100 years since the pop-up version was first introduced. They are still built around temperature sensors and timers – despite the explosion of bread variants available today. And this means that the standard does not necessarily boil fruit bread or sourders, as it would be the regular white disc.
Breville – The manufacturers of some of the best coffee machines – expect it to have a solution in the form of Breville Eye Q, the new toaster of Australian brand that uses a proprietary optical sensor that judges your toast’s doneness by the color of the bread. In other words, it uses ‘sight’ to achieve the perfect toast.
According to Breville, the “sensor” monitors the disc (s) up to 10 times a second and when your preferred roasting level is performed, the bread is raised smoothly rather than appears.
Furthermore, unlike other toasters, because it bases its cooking on color rather than time, it also does not burn the second (or third or fourth) batch of slices, you put in the eye Q. This can happen in standard brothers because the elements are already heated and roasting begins, so it is lowered in slots.
There are seven Settings shades to choose from, but you can also choose a “slightly more” color if you are not satisfied with the result (a feature already available on Brevilles existing toasters). The brand says you may need to experiment a little originally to find out what your perfect preference can be, but the promise is that your toast-what is either white, multigrain, sourdough, raisin, rye or a bagel, crumped or other non-standard type of bread-never.
Keep an eye on the expensive toast
Breville told me it took the company’s engineers 10 years to do this toaster, and they gave up almost about five years ago due to the high cost of the technique at that time. The embedded optical sensors still make this a premium product-to $ 299.95 / £ 249.95 / AU $ 399.95 for two-disc and $ 399.95 / £ 349.95 / AU $ 599.95 for the four-disc model — it is effortlessly priced for toast attachments.
However, the use of an optical sensor in a toaster is definitely revolutionary, and interesting enough, Eye Q uses only a single pair set to one side of two-slice toaster, not both as I expected. This is because Breville says their research shows that most users will shake the same kind of bread in both slots, so the sensor only needs to monitor a slice as the rest of the technology ensures even heating everywhere. You can see the green sensor light flashing in the video clip below.
In addition, Breville says that if both walls had sensors, the toaster’s footprint would rise, and one-wall design allows Eye Q hardly to be larger than most other standard two- or four-slice models.
If you want to bowl with a single slice, Breville has thoughtfully marked the gap where you need to place it. If you make the mistake of using the other, you will not get the results you want and the bowl will probably be a little underdone.
For craftsmanship, the Eye Q sensor has also been programmed to have a special sourdough mode. This takes into account the thicker slices, crustier crust and denser bread of such bread and automatically increases the browning time. To ensure that the outside of the toaster has a clean, minimalist look, this functionality is available via a long press of the main control button.
The traditional defrost/heating button has been replaced by a time mode – turned on with double press on the main button – which allows users to set a time to heat up foods such as pies and cakes.
A life -saving feature
If you’ve ever danced with death by inserting a knife or other tool into your toaster to free a fixed disc (there are estimated 700 toaster-related deaths every year), Breville has also corrected it with Eye Q as well. Not only is slots slightly wider than the standard toaster, but the bread guides automatically slide (and smooth) down to press the main control button. When your toast is ready, they rise at the same speed and appear to be placed higher in the machine, so even shorter craftsmans can still be easily picked out.
Cleaning it has also been done easily. The top of the toaster is a non-stick ceramically coated material that angles against the interior, so you just brush crumbles into the slots where they are gathered in the eye Q’s catch-all cumb tray. Unlike other curved trays in standard brothers, which only cover a narrow section along the bottom of the appliance, catch-all offers full cover, so virtually all bits and pieces fall on it to clean.
No more burnt toast
So how does it stack in the real world test? Well, full disclaimer first: I’m pretty much the perfect market for Eye Q when I stopped using my toaster a long time ago. I got tired of having to keep an eye on the bread as the slices would always come out exaggerated to me. And if I stepped away, the chances of my smoke alarm would go off. So my old toaster generally just sits on a shelf and maybe used once a year when I treat myself with a crump.
I would not say that Eye Q is the next best invention after sliced bread, but I now want to have a bowl every morning – mostly because I can’t stop watching the slices fall into the toaster and rise again (see the video clip below). I’ve spent it for seven days at the time of writing, and my first time using it was experimentation with sourdough.
I like it very lightly toasted, but even in the other surroundings the crust was exaggerated. The subsequent slices were perfect for the first setting for me. Plain white broke toasts beautifully for me in the third surrounding surroundings. Raisin Toast was not burned at all. I’m a toast conversion now!
As amazing as the toaster is, its high price will probably keep it out of reach for everyone except the most devoted by toast lovers. Eye Q can be purchased right now in Australia in four color roads – black truffle, sea salt, stainless steel and noir (replacing a white strip on the bottom of the black truffle to dark gray) – directly from Breville and authorized retailers. The US and UK accessibility of the eye Q still need to be confirmed, although Breville says it will be on the shelves “by the end of the year”.
