Bella 2 Slice Auto Shut Off Review

The Bella 2 Slice Auto Shut Off is uncomplicated and budget-friendly, delivering adequate performance across the board. It's lightweight and has a small footprint, so you can easily leave it out or transport it to and from storage with no trouble. It is available in a handful of fun colors too.

Performance Comparison

Bread Toasting Quality

First and foremost, a toaster needs to create excellent, crispy toast. With that in mind, we put bread toasting performance at the top of our list. The Bella 2 Slice Auto Shut Off performed well in these tests, and using lower heat settings our team produced toast with a lightly crisped exterior and small patches of golden color. When we increased the temperature settings, our team produced beautiful golden brown toast, and very dark toast on the most extreme settings.

Our test results highlighted that the Bella 2 Slice Auto Shut Off provides enough range in settings to achieve an equally wide range of texture and level of toasting, which should satisfy all but a truly picky toast eater.

Ease of Use

Aside from the crumb tray access inconveniently located at the rear, and requiring a little more effort than most to remove, the Bella 2 Slice Auto Shut Off is a fairly easy-to-use toaster. During operation, the body of the toaster never warmed up beyond 86.5 degrees Fahrenheit remaining comfortable to the touch.

Four buttons for frozen foods, gluten-free foods, bagels, and a cancel function, as well as a lever, and a browning dial with six settings, are all located on the front narrow face. They are all well-labeled, adequately sized, and exceptionally simple to operate.

Bagel Toasting Quality

During our bagel toasting trials, the Bella 2 Slice Auto Shut Off consistently delivered evenly toasted bagels with a satisfying crunch contrasting the mostly soft and chewy center. In subsequent tests, the resultant bagels were evenly heated, but the centers were firmer than most would prefer, keeping the toaster from scoring higher in our bagel toasting metric.

Frozen Food

The Bella 2 Slice exhibited mixed performances in frozen food tests, proving more capable with some food items than others. The Bella started the frozen food metric with strong waffle heating performance. The results weren't perfectly even across both sides of the waffles, but the results were certainly enjoyable.

Unfortunately, this model didn't do as well when preparing frozen bread or strudel. While reheated bread was generally enjoyable with good color and texture, strudels had a crispy exterior and hot filling, but the crust was overdone, resulting in a slightly burned flavor.

Should You Buy the Bella Two Slice?

One of the most essential kitchen appliances, a toaster, stands as a stalwart tasked with delivering perfectly toasted bread, waffles, and bagels to kickstart our mornings. While we generally found the Bella 2 Slice Auto Shut Off to perform satisfactorily across most of our tests, it was outperformed by comparably priced models, and we can't recommend it over those models.

What Other Toaster Should You Consider?

When it comes to performance at a modest price point, the Cuisinart CPT-122 delivers. It outshines the Bella 2 Slice and is our top recommendation for a value-minded toaster. For the most premium toasting performance, you'll have to pay a premium price. The Smeg 2-Slice offers impressive performances across most food items, creating consistent and delectable snacks, but you'll pay significantly more for it than other capable toasters. Additionally, the Smeg 2-Slice boasts attractive colors and retro-modern styling, if you are into that.