Morphy Richards Aspect Toaster review

The Morphy Richards Aspect is rather misnamed. A better name would be the Morphy Richards Monolith. It’s not exactly huge, but it still consists of a serious chunk of largely unadorned shiny black metal that wraps all the way round the main body. It’s certainly striking, then, but will it provide equally impressive grilled bread products for our delectation?

Design

Controls are kept to minimum, with a just a browning control dial and a switch to cancel the current programme. That’s it. It’s surprising to see such a simplistic toaster these days, but then it’s also debatable how many people actually use their frozen and reheat buttons. If you like that sort of thing, Morphy Richards simply suggests that you turn up the browning control by one for frozen bread and turn it down to one for reheating toast. In short, it’s a manual toaster.

Thankfully, then, the browning dial is a pleasure to use. It clicks clearly as you turn it and has enough resistance not to get moved by accident. I think that getting to know your toaster is essential these days, as we eat a much wider variety of bread than we did ten years ago, with much more of it being hand-sliced. Once you get your eye in, you should be able to adjust the timer to suit most bread types with a decent level of accuracy, rather than hovering about the toaster.

That said, it’s good to see lift-and-peek here, too. This means you can lift the handle up while toasting to check the progress without cancelling the programme, or wasting time and energy letting the elements cool down and then heat up again.

That said, regardless of whether you use lift-and-peek or simply wait for the browning to complete, the Aspect provides easy access to your toasted goods, with our standard bread sticking out a whopping 78mm above the toaster. With smaller items, such as crumpets, you still have a more-than-respectable 33mm protruding to get a hold of. No delving inside the toaster to pick things out here. The width, depth and length of the slots is decent, but unremarkable.

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Toasting

Making two perfect pieces of toast using our standard Hovis thick-sliced white loaf took two minutes and 31 seconds – which equates to a setting of around 3.5 on the dial. That used 0.038kWh of power, which is a touch over average. You can see the results below, showing good consistency across both sides and both slices. With the bread placed upright, you can see there’s only a very small non-browned area at the top of both slices, but the slots are big enough to lie most bread types down horizontally as well.

With a pretty standard toasting time and power usage, the toast is, well, pretty standard. A good crunch on the outside and warm and soft on the inside, you won’t be disappointed.

There are two crumb trays, one for each pair of slots. These are tucked away around the back, which is less convenient than having them round the front, but keeps things neat-and-tidy. The 60cm cord can be partly stored in the base to keep that tucked away, too. It’s worth noting that there’s no bagel mode on this model, which toasts just the inside of the bagel, leaving the top soft and doughy. There’s no muffin rack either for heating.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a toaster that isn’t cluttered by (potentially) useless controls, then the Morphy Richards Aspect is a decent choice. Its main strength is ease of access, as it’s by far the best easy access toaster I’ve seen to date. Combine that with lift-and-peek, and you’ve got a very convenient appliance, particularly if you like to toast smaller items. Of course, if you want a bagel mode, reheat or defrost controls, then you’ll need to look elsewhere such as the De’Longhi Icona. For those who just want something simple, though, the Aspect is a good buy.