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Mitsubishi Electric's Sealed, Insulated $270-$500 Single-Slice Toaster

You'll spend some serious bread on this thing

By Rain Noe - February 12

in Food

As we've seen before, the Japanese are obsessive about their toast. Which explains the existence of this product: The TO-ST1-T, Mitsubishi Electric's pricey single-slice toaster reportedly manufactured with the build quality of a high-end audio device.

The design is insulated and, when closed, completely sealed. It features heating elements both above and below, and apparently allows you dial in absolutely perfect toast.

Prices are all over the map: One reviewer reports having paid $500, a Japanese products e-tailer is hawking it for $369, and if this Amazon listing is real, it's going for $270.

"With the simple push of a few buttons, the Mitsubishi Electric Bread Oven Toaster TO-ST1-T allows you to choose between four cooking settings (Toast, Frozen Toast, Topping, and French Toast), four bread thickness settings (30 mm/1.1", 24 mm/0.9", 20 mm/0.7", and 15 mm/0.5"), and five baking settings (Fluffy, Medium, Regular, Well Done and Crunchy). So now you can make your toast EXACTLY how you like it."

It's crazy that there are so many glowing reviews of this thing at the links above, particularly from the U.S.; the toaster was designed and wired for the Japanese market, so you need to buy an additional voltage transformer unless you want to burn your American house down.

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Dee An

9 months ago

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When I was younger, our family had a toaster that I didn't like because it was very slow. However, my mother loved the crisp-all-the-way-through toast it produced. I've never seen a toaster with independent controls for time and for temperature.

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Scott Carpenter

9 months ago

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Are neurotic single people with excessive disposable income the target demographic?

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- Dee An
  
  Scott Carpenter
  
  9 months ago
  
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  Consider it this way - many people eat toast once or more every day. Yet they might easily spend several hundred dollars on good quality pans or knives that they only use a few times a week.
  Why shouldn't the tool that prepares toast be of high quality, if it ensures that someone's daily meal is exactly as they like it?
  (My toaster cost £40, bought after extensive perusal of Amazon reviews. For some reason, a lot of toasters in the UK are too short to accommodate a lot of the sliced bread sold in the UK. In addition to being a bit taller than normal, my toaster also allows the bread to be lifted up to check the progress without cancelling the timer)
  
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Alan Nomoto

9 months ago

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My good friend owns a number of coffee shops in Tokyo. He still mans the floor every morning at 5:30. As much as we all love shokupan, he admits he doesn't know why he can't toast it at home the way it comes out at his shops.

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