I Toasted Two Slices, Ate One, Binned the Other

My phone rang right as I dropped the bread in. Thirty seconds into the call, I'd forgotten it existed. Came back to something closer to charcoal than toast. After that, every morning was the same routine: standing there, finger on the stop button, checking through the slot like it was going to do something without permission. I got sick of watching it like a hawk and wasting good bread, so I finally switched to a Crumble toaster, and mornings went back to being easy again. Six browning levels that actually hold means I don't have to stand guard over it anymore.

👉 See what a properly tested toaster looks like

Boiling water in a kettle with any plastic in the water path releases measurable BPA and microplastic particles into what you're about to drink, and repeated exposure has been linked to hormone disruption. The unsettling part is that a lot of kettles that look like stainless steel from the outside still have a plastic filter or spout, exactly where the water sits right before it hits your cup. Mine's stainless steel where it actually matters, not just where you can see it.

👉See what a safe kettle looks like

The lid on my last kettle stopped sitting flush after a couple of years. Steam's supposed to travel up a little tube to a metal strip that heats up and trips the switch, that's actually how a kettle knows to turn itself off. If the lid's not sealed, the steam just escapes instead, and the strip never gets hot enough to trip anything. My old one kept boiling and boiling down, and I never noticed, because I'd pressed the button and wandered off like everyone does. The Crumble kettle auto switches off at 100°C and has dry-boil and overheat protection built in as a backstop, so you don't have to worry about a kettle boiling itself dry, even years down the track.

👉 See all the kettle's features

Every toaster before this one left the bread sitting 1 cm below the slot once it popped, low enough that getting it out meant either burning my fingertips or, more than once, digging around in there with a metal fork while it was still plugged in. Neither of those was ever a good idea. The Crumble extra lift function pushes toast up past the top of the slot, so I can actually just pick it up without burning my fingers.

👉See all the toaster's features

Most retro-style toasters are built for kitchens bigger than mine. This one's 196mm × 196mm, so it sits next to the kettle without either of them eating into the bit of counter I actually cook on.

Once you've got a kettle that doesn't match anything else on the counter, you notice it every morning, and start thinking about either renovating your kitchen to match the kettle or buying more appliances to match it. Buying the pair once means I'm not back at the shops in three months hunting for a toaster that's close enough.

🛒 Shop the Crumble Brekkie Bundle

I did the maths on buying separately before I saw this bundle, and it wasn't close. Four interest-free payments of $89.75 instead of two separate purchases, in two colours that might not have matched anyway. Right now the bundle's discounted from $559 to $359, backed by a  1-Year limited warranty.