The Breville Die-Cast Smart Toaster is a premium toaster with two long slots and an aluminum body. It's equipped with a handful of extra features, including the 'A Bit More' preset, which adds some time onto the end of a toasting cycle, and 'Lift and Look', which lets you lift the lever to check on your toast without stopping the toasting cycle. It also has a cycle countdown indicator to tell when your toast will be ready.
Our Verdict
The Breville Die-Cast Smart Toaster is decent. Its twin slots can fit two standard-size slices of sandwich bread side-by-side or a single long slice of country-style bread. Its slots are also pretty deep and wide enough for thicker slices. It can easily produce everything from golden brown to charred white bread within a single cycle, which is good if you frequently eat denser bread and don't want to wait around for it to toast for too long. That said, you'll observe a noticeable difference in browning depending on where you place your bread, with the inner side browning faster than the outer side. It's not consistent batch to batch, so you may have to adjust the dial if you're making a lot of toast.
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Has a cycle countdown indicator.
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Can brown denser items in a single cycle.
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Uneven toasting of inner and outer sides of bread.
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Inconsistent performance across multiple toasting cycles.
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Differences Between Sizes And Variants
The Breville Die-Cast Smart Toaster comes in one aluminum variety. You can see the label for the unit we tested here. The manufacturer also makes the Breville Die-Cast 4-Slice Smart Toaster, which we've tested separately and has four standard-length slots, and the Breville Die-Cast 2-Slice Smart Toaster, which has two standard-length slots.
If you encounter another variant, let us know in the forums, and we'll update our review.
Compared To Other Toasters
The Breville Die-Cast Smart Toaster is a long two-slot toaster. Its twin slots can easily accommodate most kinds of baked goods, and it can easily brown denser items within a single cycle. That said, the outer sides of slices tend to be browned more than the inner side, and you'll notice that certain parts of the toaster get warmer than others; models like the Cuisinart Long Slot Toaster tend to be more consistent overall. The Breville's metal body is even heavier than alternatives with a mainly metal construction, like the Smeg 4-Slice Toaster, making it a nuisance to hoist onto a shelf when putting it away.
If you're looking for other kinds of toasters, check out our recommendations for the best 2-slice toasters, the best 4-slice toasters, and the best toasters.
Test Results
This toaster has a cycle countdown indicator, which isn't always a guarantee for many toasters, and lets you keep tabs on when your toast will pop up. The bars of LED lights display a countdown for each pair of slots so you can see how long is left before your toast is ready. You also get a button for the 'A Bit More' setting, which you can press before, after, or even during a cycle to add a little more toasting time to a preset, and 'Lift and Look', which lifts the slot so you can see if your toast is ready without interrupting the cycle. The shade setting slider has five distinct presets, but you can choose half increments if you want to adjust your toast's doneness with precision.
The photo above shows the results for one slot, but you can see a full montage showing all the bread toasted here.
Note: Most toasters shorten their cycle time once the machine has heated up to maintain a consistent level of browning. The lighter second batch is likely due to this toaster overcompensating and shortening the cycle too much to avoid burning the bread.
The photo above shows the results for one slot, but you can see a full montage showing all the bread toasted here.
