I tested a $299 toaster so you don’t have to — here’s what happened

When it comes to toasters, I firmly believe in the old adage of ‘buy cheap, buy twice’, except for me it’s been a case of ‘buy cheap, buy six times’. I’ve had my fair share of cheap toasters, and they’ve mostly been utter crap. So I was pretty excited when KitchenAid offered me its Pro Line (or Artisan, here in the U.K.) toaster.

The KitchenAid Pro Line offers some impressive features to back up its enormous price tag. It boasts a premium design, promises even toasting, and packs a range of features like hands-free lowering/rising and an automatic keep warm mode.

Alas, it isn’t perfect. While it’s a good toaster, I wouldn’t say it toasts bread any better than a toaster half the price. And the included toasted sandwich cage kinda sucks.

Still, if you value ease of use and have some cash to spare, this has to be one of the best toasters out there.

KitchenAid Pro Line Toaster review: Price & availability

There’s no getting around it, the KitchenAid Pro Line is extremely pricey, at $299 for the two-slot toaster — the only model available in the States. Here in the U.K., the Pro Line is called the Artisan, with the two-slot model costing £269 and a four-slot model (unavailable in the U.S.), costing £399.

While pricey, the Pro Line is more or less on par with other premium toasters, namely the Dualit two-slice Classic, which costs $299. The KitchenAid Pro Line offers way more features than the Dualit Classic, so is the better option if you want reheating, auto up/down, and a bagel mode. In my experience, though, the Dualit Classic tends to toast more evenly, and unlike KitchenAid, Dualit offers the four-slice model Stateside — if those are priorities, it’s Dualit all the way.

The Pro Line is available in various colors: white, black, red and silver (which is essentially gray). In the U.K., the Artisan is available in a whopping 10 colors, including a rather fetching pistachio green. There’s also an “empire” red, ‘cos y’know… we are the British after all. Somewhat tone deaf naming there, KitchenAid.

KitchenAid Pro Line Toaster review: Design

The Pro Line is, in my opinion, absolutely beautiful, sporting a timeless art-deco design. It’s simultaneously stately yet understated, adding a touch of class to your counter but never drawing too much attention. Every time I notice it, I think “huh, now that is a pretty toaster.”

Size wise, the Pro Line is an absolute unit. The four-slice measures 12 x 13 x 9 inches and weighs 18.7lbs — it’s definitely one to be avoided if you’re short on space. The two-slice measures a slightly more manageable 7x 13 x 9 x inches and 12lbs, but it’s still large for a two-slice toaster. As you can see, neither is a featherweight either, and I genuinely had difficulty getting both out of their styrofoam packaging.

The upside to all this is that the Pro Line is built like a tank. There’s barely a hint of plastic in sight. Everything is essentially either enamel-clad steel or shiny chrome. I’m not sure I could break it even if I wanted to. This is a toaster to pass down to your grandkids.

KitchenAid Pro Line Toaster review: Performance

My favorite thing about the Pro Line is its array of automatic features and useful cooking modes. It has an automatic up/down mechanism that senses when food is in a slot and lowers/raises it accordingly, with a satisfying ping to let you know your toast has begun and ended. There’s not much use to this, although it’s a very smooth, steady mechanism, so avoids the classic ‘toast popping out and landing on the floor’ scenario.

Much more useful is the ‘keep warm’ setting. If the sensor detects that toast hasn’t been removed after cooking, the Pro Line will automatically lower it back down on a gentle heat to keep it warm. So no more spreading butter over cold toast if you happen to be busy or away from the toaster when it pops up. This will cook the toast ever so slightly, but I haven’t yet had burnt toast from a previously unburnt piece on account of keeping warm.

There’s a bagel mode, which is handy, only toasting one side of each bagel half, while only warming the top. You need to ensure you’ve got your bagel the correct way round, though, lest you cook the top and just warm the bread side. Thankfully there's a diagram on top of the toaster showing you which way to insert the bagel.

Naturally, there’s a defrost mode for heating frozen bread. And there’s a fourth mode which, confusingly, KitchenAid’s marketing images don’t show. On the promo shots, the toaster has a mode called “A little longer” to toast for a short time. On my two- and four-slice units, however, there’s a toasted sandwich setting instead. I guess the model online is an older version.

Anyway, the toasted sandwich setting is sucks, even using the sandwich cage — in all my tests, it simply burnt the outside of the bread while leaving innards cold and cheese unmelted.

I really like that the Pro Line’s slots are deliberately capacious, though, allowing you to toast lots of different bread styles and thicknesses. Often I struggle getting extra thick slices of bread into my parents’ Dualit Classic, but with the Pro Line I had no issues with super thick granary bread. I still had to cut flatter, longer sourdough slices in half, but that’s to be expected.

Finally, I love the toast setting slider. It's smooth, with no hard stops on each setting, so you can dial in your exact cooking time. And it features LED cooking lights, which count down to zero so you can see how long is left before your toast pops up — handy for time management when doing other stuff in the kitchen.

Toasting tests

Alas, the Pro Line’s core toasting performance was a little disappointing. Not awful, but for this much money, I want perfectly cooked toast. I ran my tests on the four-slice unit, at the middle setting of '4'.

With thinner slices of bread, the Pro Line cooked pretty evenly on both sides, with each slice of bread in each slot looking similarly toasted. As you can see, though, the toaster left the upper half and top corners less cooked. I'd expect to see less cooking at the top, as it's cooler near the opening. But there's quite a big discrepancy here with the upper section being undercooked cor my liking. These weren't tall slices of bread, either — the crusts were well and truly submerged into the toaster.

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To see if this was just an issue with the elements not having time to heat up properly, solvable by longer cooks, I left two slices in the toaster until they burned — as a sort of stress test. As you can see below, the top elements will start to cook the upper areas of bread, but a corner still gets left undercooked in comparison.

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With thicker slices of bread, I found the Pro Line always heated the sides unevenly, resulting in toast being perfect on one side and either under- of overcooked on the other, depending on the slots used. Slots 1-2 tended to undercook a side while slots 3-4 tended to burn a side. As you can see below, there was always a discrepancy between sides. Now, you want this for a bagel, but for normal toasted bread I wish the Pro Line cooked more evenly. The Dualit Classic is much better in this regard.

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Time-wise, the Pro Line takes just over 2 mins to cook at the middle setting of 4. At the lowest setting of 1, it took just under 30 seconds and at the highest of 7 it took just under 2-minutes 45 seconds.

I wouldn’t say this is particularly quick, but it isn’t slow like those awful conveyor belt toasters you find at European hotels. The combined cooking and buttering time was about right for brewing and steeping a cup of tea to wash down my toast.

KitchenAid Pro Line Toaster review: Storage & maintenance

The Pro Line is very easy to keep clean externally. The sturdy, premium design and enamel finish don’t hold onto fingerprints and grime, and are easy to wipe down. I have the toaster positioned next to my stovetop, meaning it’s constantly getting sprayed with food and oil. My old toaster held onto this and its body needed degreasing regularly. The Pro Line’s enamel looks as good as new with a quick wipe.

Unfortunately, the crumb tray is a little laughable. It’s tiny and super shallow, meaning it gets full up very quickly and can be fiddly to remove if there are big crumbs in it. It’s also easy to spill crumbs when moving the tray from toaster to food waste.

KitchenAid Pro Line Toaster review: Verdict

The KitchenAid Pro Line (or Artisan in the U.K.) is a decent enough toaster. It’s styled and built beautifully, easy to clean and packs tons of useful features — the keep warm setting is a total gamechanger for those who perennially forget about their toast.

Holding the Pro Line back from our top scores are some major annoyances, though. It’s pricey, and for this money I’d expect evenly cooked toast on both sides. The crumb tray is also inexplicably small for a toaster this bulky. But if you value convenience and features over pure toasting performance, the Pro Line is still definitely one to shortlist.