i don't know if you saw the video I made about this Densha de Go! plug and play games console
but it must have got some people thinking about things you can import from Japan and in the
comments under that one chap suggested to me that I should take a look at the
Balmuda toaster so it should come as absolutely no surprise that that is what this video is about now
at the time of making the video Balmuda who are a Japanese company don't sell this in the uk so
mine was imported from South Korea the reason for choosing a south Korean version over any other is
because their power supply is 220 volts and here in the uk it's 230 volts give or take so that
means I've got no problem using it here because there's always a bit of leeway in these things
and since South Korea use a type F plug I can just plug it into an appropriate adapter so now let me
show you what separates this Balmuda toaster out from your conventional toaster oven it's
this inlet on the top into which you pour five cc's of water from the tiny cup that's provided
the water travels down a pipe inside the machine and comes to rest in the boiler unit at the bottom
the idea being that the water turns to steam at the start of the cooking cycle which infuses the
bread and in theory I'm quoting here recreates the flavour of bread fresh from the baker's oven
apparently this layer of steam envelops the bread lightly toasting its surface while keeping its
inner moisture and flavour from escaping so you'll be able to see this process happening on screen
now I've sped the footage up considerably in order to better show the whole cooking cycle now each of
those yellow lights you see flashing at the bottom right they represent a minute in theory though
once the toast is ready rather than it being dried out it should have a soft fluffy interior and a
nicely toasted exterior apparently this process also helps somewhat to revive bread that's a
couple of days old now I feel that this one could have been toasted a little bit more evenly on the
bottom but there you go putting its headline party piece to one side for a moment I'll just
cover off the rest it's got a nice clean layout there are a number of colours available this grey
was apparently a limited edition along the bottom at the front on the right you'll find the combined
timer and on off dial whilst the seven position cooking mode selector is on the left of course the
documentation with mine was Korean and you can see from the pictures though that it recommends using
thick bread for the best results and on this page you can see suggestions as to which cooking mode
to use for various types of bread and pastries the top right one is really the cheese on toast mode
now while the Balmuda toaster isn't sold in the uk it has made its way officially to the us and
that gave me the opportunity to download the us instruction manual and there are a couple of small
differences between the model sold over there and the one in south Korea notice how a couple of the
toasting modes have been rearranged at number three on the us model there's a mode for pizza
however when you read the details of this it mentions it's also the same mode for toast with
toppings so really it is just my cheese on toast mode but with a different symbol
since heating up pizza slices must be considered to be an essential feature in models sold in the
us the toaster that sold there comes with a baking pan to put them in mine wasn't supplied with one
but I found a suitably sized one online on my toaster the timer also functions as the on off
switch when it's rotated on the us version the on off switch is a separate push button
in the middle but as far as I can tell those are the only differences effectively this is the same
device that's sold in japan and the us so it's good that I was able to get hold of an English
language version of the instructions to help me get the most out of it without having to resort to
using the google translate app but other than the steam function it really is just quite a simple
device I mean there's one element at the top in the centre another one in the bottom but you might
have noticed that it uses these in a slightly unusual way turning them on and off during
toasting alternating between the two many times as well as having moments when neither is lit and
it's only really when it comes to the very end of the cycle that they both briefly activate together
with full intensity to finish off the browning you can see how this process works from this image the
x-axis represents time going from the left to the right so if we look along the bottom you can see
that it starts off with steam cooking and then moves into toasting but just above this they show
which elements are switched on and off during the process and you can see how it only reaches the
traditional toasting section right at the end of the cycle so if you're looking through that window
at your bread it only really changes colour in the final minute or so now whilst you see I've
taken the toaster out of my kitchen to shoot this video for the last few weeks it has been in there
and I've used it every day to toast cook and heat various types and thicknesses of bread
and pastries amongst other things and I think I've used it long enough now to form a proper opinion
about how well it works and whether or not this steam technology has made a significant difference
over a conventional toaster oven for me now to explain how I feel about this I want to tell you a
bit of a story although I get a lot of complaints about talking too much in these videos if you're
one of those people that's in a mad hurry well down at the bottom you can change the speed to
two times play if you're on a touchscreen device you can double tap on the right hand side of the
screen to skip forward if you're on a keyboard you can press L to jump forward 10 seconds so all the
controls are at the user's end I'm going to take as long as I feel like and this is the story I
get my hair cut wait for it in the back garden with the misses cutting them with some clippers
when you've got hair like this it's not worth spending any effort over it so she just
takes the hair off when it gets too long takes all of five to ten minutes or something
now there was one occasion where I had to go on holiday the next day and the clippers broke and
in a rush at lunchtime at work I went off to the local barbers and I just wanted my hair cutting
shorter for you know this two-week holiday and I walked in and I saw the prices on the wall and I
was like you know because I hadn't paid for it for years and this was one of those ones that thought
they were a little bit special I think you know they thought they were like some super duper cool
barber so I'm like but I'm already in the place so I think oh right I'll get it done the guy says
have you got an appointment you know again trying to pretend it's all brilliant and the place was
empty I said no I haven't he said oh I can just fit you in you know one of those kind of places oh
show anyway so I sat down and it took forever this guy's cocking about with my hair he's got these
scissors like this and he's doing this behind the head not even touching the hair I mean it was like
this kind of length not even going anywhere near it it's got the comb in one and scissors and it's
like Edward Scissorhands [ __ ] about round the back of my hair eventually towards the end of it
he cuts it with some clippers just like the missus would have done and charges me goodness knows what
it was but it was quite expensive and you know what it looked exactly the same as when the
misses cut it in five minutes in the back garden right that's how I feel about this there's a lot
of fannying about you're sticking water in it it's lighting all the things at different speeds going
through this whole choreographed routine and it's expensive and at the end of it what comes
out toast toast that seems pretty much the same as toast that are made in any other toaster in
my life so yeah that's how I feel about this a lot of palaver and at the end of it you just get toast
a little piece of toast now of course I'm only able to comment on the the texture although
that is pretty much what this thing's all about after all if you get bread and you char it it's
not going to taste any different in this than it would in anything else however I've mentioned the
thing about loss of taste before no it's not covid no I'm not going to go into it all again but if
you've been here a long time you know the very first successful video I ever made was about a
toaster that was back in 2007 so here we are again but anyway so since I can't really taste it of
course I run it by the misses so what do you think of this does this toast taste any better is it
any different to any other toast you've had and she's like no it's pretty much like normal toast
she didn't notice any difference either now bear in mind I've been using this thing for
weeks now every day putting all sorts of different kinds of breads into it I haven't used any of the
the oven part of it because the oven part is just like an oven you don't even put water
in for that it's just like a normal little oven I've got an oven in the house I wouldn't need to
use this but you can imagine it'd heat stuff up that you put in it that's by the buy the reason
that people get one of these is for this amazing better quality toast that it's supposed to make
than any other devices in fact if you look at their website there's loads of enticing pictures
of different kinds of foods that have been cooked in this and it all looks very appetising in
fact they've done a great job with the website beautiful pictures recipes from renowned chefs
really draws you into it gets you quite invested in the product you think oh yeah I want one of
these but when you start to look at it a little bit deeper you realise that a lot of that stuff is
not quite what it seems let me explain here's a recipe I spotted on their Korean website this
looks appetising I pictured it would just involve putting a few things into the toaster by the time
you make your morning cup of coffee this breakfast will be ready courtesy of the Balmuda however once
you turn on the translator it all turns out to be far more down to earth the instructions tell you
to cook the bacon and egg in a frying pan whilst you're toasting a slice of bread in the toaster
at the end you butter the toast and you put your fried bacon and egg on the top I should really
write that recipe down just in case I forget it I mean it's a similar deal with this one cook
some stuff in a pan and at the end of it pop it on top of some toast so of course you could use
any toaster to make these recipes there's nothing clever going on here the truth of the
matter is that you don't really want to cook anything in this Balmuda toaster that could
drip down onto that heating element I'm sure it wouldn't break it but you don't really want
to be burning a load of egg yolk on it either so when it all boils down to it pun intended
this cooks the same things you can in any normal toaster oven no more and no less
and that leads me on to talking about a few things that I do and don't like about this toaster oven
sounds a little bit like Car Wow perhaps I should be poking it with a stick here's five things
I don't like about this toaster oven I don't know if there are five but anyway let's start
off with number one it's slow the steam and toast process means that it takes longer than any normal
toaster I've used before on the top of the case it suggests that toast should take between two
and a half and three and a half minutes so let's give that a go here's a piece of bread thickly
cut as suggested in the instructions and it also states that you should place it with the rounded
edge facing the front I'm not kidding right so I'm adding the water but I know from toasting a
piece of this same bread earlier on that three and a half minutes was way too short so let's
try five minutes this time but fast forward five minutes and you can see that this still needed a
little bit longer and helpfully that brings me on to the next issue with a normal toaster if your
bread needs a little bit longer you just pop it in again but with this device due to its cooking
cycle system that starts with steam and then has a few minutes of toast disco followed by the
toasting section at the end that's the bit we need well we can't just start all over again instead
if your toast needs a bit more browning it's a matter of turning the dial to the hottest oven
mode and then cooking it that way for a couple of minutes this is how the manual tells you to do it
so in my case a couple more minutes in the other mode and well it's still not perfectly browned
and it's also a little bit hard now as well so it's a matter of learning and then remembering
how much time you need for each type of bread and bear in mind the thickness of the slice at the age
of the bread will also impact on those times and that brings me on to the next point there's no
frozen bread mode now the answer seems to be to increase the time but you'd think with all that
carefully managed second by second temperature regulation that surely frozen bread should be
treated differently to fresh bread but hey what do I know I'm no bread scientist next in my
experience it's a bit of a messy beggar it always seems to be leaving crumbs on the counter they
seem to have a habit of blowing out of the device when you close or open the door of course there
is the usual crumb tray in the bottom but I've noticed that crumbs also have a habit of getting
caught in a little channel just inside the door now I don't know if that's designed as some kind
of crumb trap but if it is they could have made emptying it a bit easier you have to unclip the
shelf and then the crumbs can't be brushed out with a finger you've got to vacuum them
another issue that's caused by the steam mechanism is that after cooking something you have to wait
for the whole thing to cool down before you can toast something else if you don't wait the pipes
and the boiler tray are going to be so hot that any water poured into the top immediately boils
away into nothing before you've even started oh and don't lose that cup I mean you could replace
it with something else if you do but remember whenever you want to toast some bread you're
going to have to use the cup of water as well your toaster now comes in two parts and one more thing
the cooking mode selector on the left is a little bit hard to read from a normal distance
especially at an angle it would be nice if this also had LEDs to show the currently selected
option moving on to the positives though I do like the clicky sound that the timer makes
now you should take this review in context it's just the opinion of one chap who's
bought this and he's got no sense of taste and his misses isn't some massive toast aficionado
the toast that comes out of this seems just fine I've got no complaints there it's just I didn't
notice a significant difference over any other toast I've had and therefore the extra time and
effort required in making that toast didn't seem to be worthwhile for me I feel that perhaps the
marketing height was so great that the product could never live up to it I was expecting some
kind of toast revelation a life-changing toast-based experience but in reality
of course there's only so much difference you can make between one piece of toast and another I do
like the fact that toaster is neat and stylish as well as available in a number of interesting
colours and it also seems well put together and when you consider that this is a product that was
intended for the Japanese market that then became so in demand that it's now sold in other countries
there must be plenty of people out there who experience something special in the results
that unfortunately has passed me by and the misses as well but we all know that food is subjective we
don't all appreciate exactly the same things in the same way and that's one of the things that
keeps life interesting after all someone's keeping that tripe stall at the local market in business
and that is definitely not me anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching