I was really excited about eating toast. Too bad it doesn’t work. The lever doesn’t stay down. If I hold it there it seems to be toasting, but something’s wrong with it. After reading all the reviews I decided to purchase this toaster. The problem I had with it was once I pressed the lever down it would not stay down longer than 37 seconds before it would pop up again. I had to push it down 3 times to get it toasted. Not sure if this toaster was defective but it should not take 3 cycles to get the bread toasted. The heating elements are too far away to toast regular bread…it looked liked the inside heating element was hotter than the other & therefore the bread on one side was darker than the other. The wide slots are better for toasting bagels than regular bread. I returned it & purchased a cheaper toater but have the same problem with the heating elements & one side being darker than the other. At least with the new one the lever stays down longer. Looks like they’re all made that way to accomodate bagels. The toaster is well made and does a good job of toasting. However, if I had it to do again, I would buy the KitchenAid model that has long slots and can toast four regular or two long pieces of bread at the same time.The toaster works well enough, consistent with other reviews that influenced my purchase. Shortcomings? An “ejection” button, which on my old Cuisinart allowed me to pop my toast manually, and the “lift high” feature that raised small pieces of toast — my husband liked this feature on the old Cuisinart. I like my toast very dry. On the Kitchen Aid, I toast twice, the setting dependent on the freshness (i.e., moisture) of the bread. With the Cuisinart ejection button feature, I conveniently popped the toast at will. My husband likes to toast last night’s biscuits. On the Kitchen Aid, he has to 1) reach into the toaster or 2) use a fork, to extract the biscuit. We opted for a respected U.S.A. brand name as we have well-performing Kitchen Aid Mixers so we thought they would know how to make a toaster. Wrong!
As one of the most expensive toasters available on line it has one major flaw. The slots are not long enough to fit a standard American slice of bread. One must squeeze the bread on the ends to make them fit down the business end of this toaster. While it is wide enough for bagels, it is not long enough for good old USA standard loaf bread.
This product gets two stars because it does seem to brown toast evenly, once you squeeze the bread down the undersized slots.
Back to the drawing board, perhaps in China they eat skinny bread, but you would think this great “American” household brand would be able to tell their Chinese factory to design a toaster to fit American bread? And yes, we would pay more for this product if they produced it in the USA, instead of sending more jobs overseas. read more.
Tags: 2Slice, Black, KitchenAid, KMTT200OB, Metal, Onyx, Stainless, Steel, Toaster