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A few years back, I tested a toaster with a fancy touchscreen, a computer brain, a whopping price tag, and a surprising inability to make good toast.
One particular disappointment was how the bottom inch or so of each bread slice I put into the toaster didn’t get nearly as crisped up as the rest of it. There was the tantalizing whiff of a new style of heating coils and software algorithms to help you get the most from your toast, but the device didn’t live up to its potential.
That was Revolution Cooking’s InstaGlo R270 toaster. Its freshly minted successor, the $400 R180 Connect Plus Smart Toaster, expands on the touchscreen-centric design while adding new abilities like being able to connect to your Wi-Fi network, update its firmware, show up to 24 photos on its screen, and display the weather.
I may have missed the memo, but do we need all this from our toasters?
Before answering that, here’s some good news. They fixed it. Or, at least part of it. The “it doesn’t toast the bottom inch of the toast” part has been solved by concentrating more coils at the bottom of each slot. I ran into Revolution CEO Tom Klaff at a trade show after I panned that first model—always awkward!—and he graciously mentioned how for this new version, they’d fixed the problem I’d flagged (likely along with lots of others), which they refer to in toaster lingo as the “chimney effect.”
That’s me, scoring you extra toaster coils in V2. [Curtsy.]
I wish that both the new toaster and I could claim victory and celebrate with a thick slice of sourdough slathered with butter and marmalade and sprinkled with flaky salt, but there was other stuff to figure out. First, there’s that touchscreen, and now an internet connection. Does a toaster need a screen when a simple dial (or knob) might suffice? Do you need a screen in your kitchen, one that stays lit all the time, including while you sleep? Do algorithms make for better toast?
The Revolution toasted most of the bread slice, but not all of it—and not to the darkness I asked for.
Photograph: Joe Ray
Once it’s plugged in, the Revolution’s screen is on and currently never goes off. Instead of turning off after breakfast, it stays on, a big “R” logo the color of glowing coils in the center. If it’s nighttime and you’re sleeping, it’s on. Fiddle with it a bit and connect it to Wi-Fi and it will display the weather on the screen. Instead of sun, cloud, or snowflake icons floating across the seven-inch screen like they likely do on your phone’s weather app, the current conditions are displayed across the bottom inch of the screen, leaving plenty of room for that logo, which hasn’t budged.
Fiddle some more and you can upload up to 24 photos to the toaster by scanning a QR code that appears on its screen. Having never put photos on a toaster before, I was at a bit of a loss as to what to put on all-day display, but then I thought of the neon-blue vibes on the cover of my wife Elisabeth’s new novel and let it cast its cool glow across the kitchen. If you’ve been looking for a digital photo frame for your kitchen, this might be appealing to you.
On the screen, you also can choose what kind of toast you’re having from among 22 bread types, like sourdough, bagel, multigrain, or cinnamon swirl. The R180’s less-fancy siblings have a mere five or six toasting options. Choose your bread type, then select the level of doneness, using an on-screen photo of the predicted result for each heating level, plug in whether your bread is frozen or fresh, hit Start, and you’re on your way to toasty perfection, or at least should be. (Toast Song nerds, there’s no lever to push down, but you can still watch the wires get hot.)
Using algorithms involving food variables like density and thickness, the toaster measures the incoming voltage and the temperature inside the toaster, then mechanically draws your toast into the slot and starts to glow. A PR rep for Revolution told me they could divulge only so much because of Trade Secrets (their caps), but they could say the company’s “algorithms take everything into account to do what they need to do to ensure optimal toasting.”
Yet for whatever brains Revolution plugged into the machine, it didn’t toast very well. This is a big bummer considering you can get a well-reviewed toaster with a dial and no screen for a 10th of the price. Or you can get a very analog Balmuda, which might even make you happy.
Over and over in my testing, what emerged from the slot after a cycle was consistently way short of the doneness level I chose on the start screen. Among the bread I tested, I tried Trader Joe’s sourdough on the sourdough setting, everything bagels from Eltana in Seattle on the bagel setting, and my own homemade no-knead bread on the artisan bread setting, among others. I used the fresh and frozen settings depending on what state my bread was in, and nothing came out looking like the image of the toasted items shown above my requested doneness setting. Generally, the toast was quite underdone, occasionally it was uneven, and sometimes, particularly for the bagels, the surface became oddly spotted along its edges.
The bagel setting was weak.
Photograph: Joe Ray
It’d be one thing if you could input feedback after you’ve toasted so those algorithms could get to work making adjustments for your next slices. The toasters come factory calibrated, but I’d be happy to do some at-home calibration if it meant my toast came out like it looked on the screen when I hit Start. For now, that’s not an option.
There is also not an “add 30 seconds” or Breville-style “a bit more” option to help get you across the finish line, though Revolution’s PR reps said the 15-second Reheat button “can help put a little extra color on if needed.” The company’s website says it may offer updates for its Wi-Fi–enabled devices, so in theory those welcome improvements could appear at some point.
Normally, I’d really dive in with the toaster testing at this point, trying the whole range of doneness levels and toast types, but I kept shooting for medium darkness and getting low, making the screen and the algorithms kinda pointless. When you’ve got a toaster that can’t really toast and currently offers no way to improve itself, you’ll be plenty happy with “regular” toasters with levers and dials.
