So I bought the Salter deep sandwich toaster because of the deep filling aspect of the heating plates hoping I would be able to get thicker cheese toasties. The XL model seemed the right one for me, because it had all the features I wanted for making the perfect deep toasties. There happens to be a problem though, and despite this being rather a nice looking product, there is one particular thing I find hard to swallow about my Salter sandwich toaster, which I have not yet been able to over come, it is down to its size. Lets take a look in my review.
As you can see above, the salter sandwich maker really is a stylish looking gadget for the kitchen, in sleek red with brushed steel on the top embossed with the logo. When you open it up, you’ll be in for a nice pleasant surprise aswell because take a look at the size and depth of the hotplates!
They are deeper as you can see, and also larger than the standard sized hotplates you find on lesser branded toastie makers. They have a nice shell like pattern on them too – so far – so good – I am really looking forward to eating my cheese toastie made with this great looking item. So on we go, next up we place a slice of the very popular loaf (warburtons thin sliced white bread) on it to see how it sizes up compared to these massive cooking hotplates. You can instantly see there is a problem here. Salter have made their sandwhich maker with such enthusiasm (and believe you me, they have done a great job) that perhaps they should have mentioned (maybe they do somewhere and I haven’t seen it yet though) that you may have difficulty or a problem in getting a loaf of bread large enough to create a good seal around the edge of the sandwich. You can’t fault the actual sandwich maker they have come up with, but getting a big enough sliced loaf which this device can easily cope with is turning out to be a problem for me.
Now I have a friend with whom I was talking to about this salter model before I did this review, and after some thought he came up with the idea of buying an unsliced loaf and cutting it long ways. In theory this sounds like a good idea, so I went to Aldi – but they didn’t have a loaf large enough. Ideally, the bread really needs to reach the most highly raised parts of the heated area in order to create a good seal and avoid having the food filling spill out as it melts. So today I will be off to morrisons to see if they have anything near large enough to meet the demands of this excellent toaster.
Its easy to see how far away from the mould in the middle these warburtons bread slices are. There is no way on earth that as good a seal could possibly be achieved using this bread in the toastie maker. However, with perseverance I decided to give it a go and place the food away from the middle in the hope that as it melted and cooked, it would possibly not leak out so much. I also reduced the amount I put on the bread – which defeats the object of having such a large sandwich maker in the first place (from a deep fill point of view). In reality, it isn’t the toaster that has the problem of size – it’s the bread. I just wanted to make that quite clear because the Salter itself is as perfect a sandwich maker as it could be.
Oh Dear – out runs all the cheese. As I anticipated the filling all ran out into the middle. Having said this, the actual sandwich was delicious and I will carry on using it like this with too small a slice of bread until I can get one which matches up to this massive sandwich maker by salter.
Size Problem with Salter Deep Sandwich Toaster XL for Making Toasties.
Pros
- - Large
- - Easy to use
Cons
- - Big loaves hard to find - not Salters Fault!