Breville Eye Q toaster review: a ‘revolutionary device’ that makes perfect toast without me trying

It’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.

At a glance

For perfectly toasted bread every time:
Breville Eye Q Auto 4 Slice Toaster

$400 at Breville

What we loved

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.”

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 seven shades of browning from light to dark, but if you underestimated the brownness you want, you can also hit the button called “a bit more”, which adds one more shade of toasting on that seven-shade continuum.

What’s more, the toaster was very easy to clean, with all the crumbs dropping down to the crumb tray. The exterior wiped easily and didn’t tarnish from the heat over repeated use.

It’s a shame that …

the result of different toaster settings using the Breville Eye Q Toaster

We toasted identical slices of bread at every level and were expecting to see an ombre pattern when laid out in order. What we found was more of a mosaic. Setting two was inexplicably lighter than setting one, and setting six a bit less browned than settings five and seven.

When toasting an individual slice, a diner would likely still be happy with the outcome, as they are all in the ballpark of what to expect. But from a testing perspective, the gradations were not as precise as we would have liked.

Is the Breville Eye Q toaster worth it?

Slices of bread in a Breville Eye Q Toaster

It’s a toaster. As in Groudes-Peace’s electric car analogy, both a combustion clunker and a Tesla can get you to and from work.

But for the kitchen nerd or toast lover, this is a revolutionary device that makes really good toast with next to no effort. It is also a new technology that I suspect we will soon see in ovens and other devices – imagine, for example, if your oven could tell you that your roast chicken is ready not only through a reading on a thermometer probe, but also by correlating that doneness with a visual inspection of the skin browning – and adjusting accordingly. The stuff of culinary scientist dreams.

By the way, what’s the food science behind toast?

Culinary scientists and research chefs like me love to use toast as an example for illustrating two food science principles responsible for deliciousness. The first is Maillard browning, the process where heat applied to amino acids and reducing sugars (protein and starch) give us the beloved nutty brownness we crave in pastries, seared meats, and, yes, toast.

The second is the ability to reverse starch retrogradation by reheating food. Retrogradation is a realignment of starch molecules as they cool over time, causing the dry staleness we know from old bread, takeout rice in the fridge, cold cooked pasta and so on. Reheating starchy foods such as these temporarily reverses the process, solving the mystery of why day-old rice is so delicious when briefly reheated as fried rice. The same principle makes toast tasty.