Toast with the most

Toasters are one of those kitchen appliances you need reliable and consistent results from, but too many people are waking up to inferior, unevenly browned toast, according to a survey of the Voice Your Choice member research community.

More than 500 respondents told us about their toasting habits, with 41% revealing they grapple with their toaster not toasting evenly. Ease of cleaning, along with slots that are not wide or big enough, are other major toaster problems that leave a burnt taste in the mouth.

As one respondent sums up: "Fast toasting, toasts both sides the same – why is it so rare? At the moment I only buy cheap toasters as I find they work as well as expensive ones but I would pay more for an innovative design that can be cleaned properly."

Happily, 34% of survey respondents said they don't have any problems with their pop-up toasters.

What's in the slot?

With toasters becoming increasingly versatile, people are experimenting with putting more varied items in their toasters, like banana bread. We asked Voice Your Choice members what they like to put into their toasters. By far, multigrain bread is the most popular:

After uncovering Voice Your Choice members' toasting habits, we've now incorporated multigrain results into our toaster reviews along with our usual white bread test (which is still important because white bread makes it easier to check uniformity of the browning across multiple slices of one type of bread).