Bread being toasted in a Breville Eye Q 4 Slice Toaster Guardian journalism is independent. We earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more .
I toasted just about every kind of bread in Breville’s new Eye Q – and each slice came out perfectly toasted
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Prefer the Guardian on Google Jump to At a glance What we loved It’s a shame that … Is the Breville Eye Q toaster worth it? By the way, what’s the food science behind toast? I t’s a centuries-old problem: how to prepare the perfect slice of toast. Historical toasters range from a simple iron frame standing slices of bread in front of a hearth to Rube Goldberg-like contraptions of springs and knobs that turn, flip and eject.
The core technology of the toaster has changed little in the past 100 years. A coil of high-resistance wires is activated for a certain period, and the radiant heat from that coil warms and browns the bread. The only measure of doneness that a traditional toaster has is time, but, as anyone who has had burnt toast for breakfast knows, time is a very imprecise proxy.
Breville’s new Eye Q toaster aims to change that legacy. Rather than setting a clock to tick until toast pops out, the Eye Q actually “looks” inside the toaster at the bread to determine whether it is done, thanks to a heat-resistant optical sensor that flashes 10 times per second to monitor the browning process. Hence the gadget’s catch phrase: “We watch your toast so you don’t have to.”
“It took us 10 years to get this project right,” Tom Groundes-Peace, global category manager and head of research at Breville, said. Groundes-Peace likens the innovation to the electric car: while cars evolved over the last century, they were all variations powered by an internal combustion engine. Until the electric motor.
As a culinary scientist and research chef, I had the chance to try the toaster and see if it lived up to its hype. I work at the Drexel Food Lab at Drexel University , where we develop and test food products (including projects for the Guardian ). We even have a collection of antique toasters.
For perfectly toasted bread every time: Breville Eye Q Auto 4 Slice Toaster
What we loved Bread being toasted in a Breville Eye Q 4 Slice Toaster I toasted just about everything I could fit in the Eye Q to see if I could stump it. What about a dark pumpernickel? Would that stymie the sensor? It worked. Sweet cinnamon raisin bread? Worked. A thick slice of frozen sourdough? Also perfectly toasted.
The idea is that because the toaster is monitoring browning, there is no need to adjust settings for thick, frozen and so on. Groundes-Peace said: “What we’ve found is that nearly every type of bread changes color – even a dark rye. It still goes through caramelization. [The sensor] picks up on even minimal changes.” What about frozen slices? ”The Eye Q doesn’t care. All it measures is color. So it will keep going through defrosting until the color changes.”
Breville Eye Q 4 Slice Toaster from $400 $400 at Breville $400 at Williams Sonoma View image in fullscreen Photograph: Faustina Boakye/The Guardian $400 at Breville $400 at Williams Sonoma Breville Eye Q 4 Slice Toaster from $400 $400 at Breville $400 at Williams Sonoma We also liked the bagel setting, which, with cut side out, toasts the bagel’s sandwich side more, meaning the side in your hand isn’t browned but warmed.
The toaster offers s…