2013-08-24

After over a year of ownership I am impressed enough by the product to provide a review about our Dualit 6 Slice Toaster.

So – a little back story – appliances always break in sympathy – first the kettle went bang (after 15 hard years of service) and then our 4 slice digitally controlled Breville toaster decided that it’d only toast one side of the bread.

With a growing family – that is three small boys of 5 and under – toast becomes a staple filler whether it is with an egg for breakfast, marmite for lunch, or with jam for late evening snack.  In fairness to our Breville toaster, it had done well but was economically beyond repair.



Our new toaster … waffles & bread being toasted at the same time.

Now the nice thing about the Breville was that it had two sets of independent slots and each pair could be set to provide a different level of browning.  But did we really need this level of sophistication?  The answer, after much deliberation was – not really.

So where to go next – buy another cheap toaster that’d become landfill in a few years or splash the cash on a toaster that would last a lifetime?  Landfill lucked out this time and we decided to go for the toaster that has users replaceable spares readily available – and so we ordered the Dualit 6 Slice Toaster with the Stainless Steel finish.

Now Dualit sell a bunch of different types of toasters – only their semi-industrial range has user replaceable parts – so that’s what we went for.   The literature on the Dualit Toaster range is not the best – after looking at 2, 4 and 6 slice, plus bun warmers, we settled on their flagship model – a design effectively unchanged since 1952 – 6 slices and a mechanical timer.

So here’s a quick run down of the main features,

All parts user replaceable

A mechanical switch to heat select 2, or 4, or 6 slots (slots are energised in pairs from the left of the machine)

A mechanical timer to selected the toasting duration

A lever to raise and lower the toast during cooking (allows a progress check of the toast without turning off the heat)

Crumb tray

195 slices of toast per hour – enough to feed even the largest of families

Accessories available including bun warmer and toasted sandwich cage

The Dualit Toaster came in a nice big box – nicely packaged, and with a UK Plug.  The manual can only be described as functional – more care appears to have been taken with the promotional leaflet describing Dualit’s other products, but I suppose there’s not much more for it to say than plug in, insert bread, then toast.

So on with the review – everything was unpacked, and the instructions say run the toaster on all slots for 3 minutes to burn off the manufacturing protection from the elements – this was duly done with the windows wide open to allow the excess smoke to exit the kitchen.

And then it was time to cook some toast – the slot selector was returned to ’2′, bread popped in, the level dropped to locate the bread in the toaster, and 2 minutes selected on the mechanical dial – after cooking, I lifted the mechanical lever and there was two slices of perfectly cooked toast.  As with all new appliances, there is a little bit of a learning curve – and we soon adapted to setting the mechanical timer to suit the type of bread being toasted.

Cleaning the crumb tray was a simple – it pulls out, tap the back of it to remove the crumbs and pop it back in.  The only disappointment that I had with the toaster is the crumb tray – the edges of the crumb tray were not chamfered as I would have expected for a product of this quality.

This is just the first part of the review about this Dualit Toaster – we’ll be adding reviews of the Sandwich Cage accessories coming next time.

We’ve toasted normal bread, bread from the freezer, burger buns, waffles, crumpets – all with no problems at all.

We are very pleased with the Dualit toaster, after living with the product for over a year, we’d not want to part with it – it is fantastic and just gets on with the job of toasting. It is a worthy investment that should last a lifetime.

The Dualit 6 Slice Toaster is available to purchase from Amazon.

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