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Breville Eye Q Toaster Review: Neat Sensors, but Less-Than-Perfect Toast
The first time you try Breville's new high-tech toaster, do it in the dark. Along with the subtle green lights on the front face and the mellow orange glow of the wires, what will be impossible to miss are the rapidly blinking laser-green lights emanating from the left slot, disco dance style.
Behold! The Breville Eye Q toaster, which instead of using a traditional toaster timer, uses optic sensors to scan your toast 10 times a second, the company says. The toaster uses the green blinking lights to monitor the doneness of your toast as it toasts, bringing the proceedings to a halt as soon as the results are right where you’ve indicated you want them.
This means the toaster looks at your bread as it arrives in the slot, then toasts it to shades that are darker than that. (Curiously, Breville divides the doneness settings into seven progressively darker shades. Perhaps it's not 10 shades because everything past seven is just progressive shades of burnt?)
As we further explore this curious appliance, temporarily suppress the urge to say this is too much tech for toast, and appreciate that it's pretty impressive Breville has figured out how to cook this way.
If, by chance, you've used a toaster before, you'll find the design of the $300 Breville Eye Q 850 Auto 2 Slice and its $400 four-slot sibling easy to understand. Press the big button on the front and the bread glides down into the slots. (You know, just push down the lever and the wires get hot.) Buttons on the left and right adjust between doneness levels. If the toast comes up lighter than you were anticipating, Breville's now classic "A bit more" button will make it a little darker for you. Depending on where you live in the world, there's a bagel or crumpet setting; just make sure the toasting faces point outward so the sensors are looking at the correct side.
By holding the start/stop button for two seconds before toasting, you can trigger sourdough mode, which stops the toasting when the center of the bread is a little lighter than it would be in regular toast mode. This is designed to keep the sourdough edges, which are more prone to burning, from doing so. Press the button twice quickly and it goes into old-fashioned timer mode, which Breville suggests for treats like Pop-Tarts and frozen waffles.
Speaking of frozen, there's no button for that. The sensors don't care if your toastable is frozen or not; it just toasts until it reaches the desired darkness, same as it would on regular toast. It'll take a little longer, but as far as the toaster's concerned, the end goal is the same.
Along with Breville's perfect looped plug, which makes plugging and unplugging a breeze and saves wear and tear on your cord, there are two particularly nice bits of design here. First is how the power cord tucks into the back of the unit, helping keep your countertop nice and neat—no Room Rater cord violations here! Second is a pleasingly capacious, easy-to-use crumb tray. Charmingly, the schematic block diagram and abstract used in Breville’s US patent application are etched into the bottom of the crumb tray, an Easter egg for the optic-sensor set.
It's also pretty good looking as countertop appliances go, a bar that Breville's products tend to clear easily. The “dark noir” brushed steel is handsome, the controls intuitive, and the ceramic-coated top is clean and will likely stay that way over time, more so than a traditional stainless top.
Over the summer, I brought the Eye Q along for a couple of weeks of family time in New Hampshire, where we were often eight or more around the table, tweens to octogenarians. Most everyone was intrigued by the toaster, and encouragingly, nobody needed coaching on how to use it.