The Tao of toasters—how one man built a $1,800 two-slicer

The most expensive toaster in our Ratings is the four-slice Breville BTA840XL, which typically sells for $180. But Thomas Thwaites, a graduate student at London's Royal College of Art, spent 10 times that trying to build a toaster from scratch. The results are hilariously detailed in his book "The Toaster Project," which begins with him reverse engineering a six dollar toaster from the local drugstore and ends with the toaster's element overheating and melting.

Still, Thwaites' efforts demonstrate a thing or two about toasters. For starters, the one he deconstructed had at least 400 parts. "How can you buy that level of complexity for the price of a drink in a fancy bar in London," he told interviewer Kai Ryssdal on the NPR show Marketplace. He also discovered all the natural resources that go into making a toaster including iron, copper, mica and plastic, which is made from oil. "When I say, ‘I have made a toaster,' I mean really made it, literally from the ground up; starting by digging up the raw materials," Thwaites writes in the book's forward. "An alternate version would be that I tried and failed to build a toaster."

The toasters in Consumer Reports labs are all intact. When our testers get to work they make batches and batches of toast to see which machines brown the most evenly and consistently. The Breville, mentioned above, was very good at these tasks as well as browning toast to the light or dark hue desired. It got top marks for ease of use and is a recommended model. We also recommend the $15 Proctor-Silex Cool-Touch 22203, a two-slicer, which was not as easy to use but was very good or excellent at all toasting tasks.

Our CR Best Buys were the two-slice Hamilton Beach Digital 22502 for $35 and the four-slice Cuisinart CPT-190 for $90. In fact, you can buy all 32 toasters on our recommended list for about two-thirds of what Thwaites spent on the materials for his toaster. Of course, his quest wasn't about building a better toaster but exploring how our natural resources are used to make consumer products. As one reviewer wrote: It's "a parable of our interconnected society, for designers and consumers alike."

—Mary H.J. Farrell