When toasted sandwich bags don’t fit the toaster it’s frustrating! If your toaster is a regular toaster and you buy toaster bags so you can make toasted sandwiches without making a mess, then you might quickly discover the bags are too big for the toaster! That’s just annoying. That ruined Plan A!

Nobody tells you that toasted sandwich bags need a long slot toaster! No… they keep that little gem all to themselves don’t they. Toaster bags also work under a grill, or in a toaster oven, but that’s no excuse!

I’ve just had to buy a new toaster; I’d quickly grabbed one the other year when I moved house, but then my toaster bags no longer fitted! Doh, rookie error #1! It finally grated on me so much that I had to buy a new toaster 🙂

Years ago I had a great toaster, it had very long slots and it was variable width; I took it for granted. One day I’ll find another toaster just like that one and buy it – but, for now, I needed a long slot toaster that’d fit my toasted sandwich bags.

Save Money on Cooking and Get Better Meals!

In the back of my head I was thinking that if I make more toastie meals then I’ll be able to save money on cooking some items, but, additionally, I’d be able to cook some items better, to produce a better result, to get better meals.

I’ve been quite happy/ish making toasted cheese sandwiches using my toaster and microwave, but the bread does sometimes get chewy that way! Ditto with making fish finger toasties and not having the “crunch” of the fish fingers.

But there are more foods I enjoy as snacks that would benefit from being toasted, rather than microwaved, quite a few once I started thinking! So the toaster bags had to make a reappearance in the kitchen, they’d been packed away for the last three years or more as I’d moved about.

What Is the Difference Between a Long Slot Toaster and a Regular Toaster?

Here’s the trickery – the product descriptions don’t actually ever measure the slots! They don’t give you that detail. It turns out that there’s not a lot of difference in the length. I had expected the slot to be much longer than it was, but it was good enough for my toasted sandwich bags, so I’ll not return it.

Regular Toaster Slot -v- Long Slot Toaster

I measured the slots of both toasters:

• My old toaster had a 14cm slot
• The new, long slot, toaster had a 15.5cm slot.

The toaster description said it fitted larger slices and some of the reviews said this toaster fitted a Warburtons slice of bread; I don’t buy Warburtons bread, so that wasn’t much use to know!

But the toaster bags definitely fitted. That was all I was asking of it.

Two Toasters, Two Identical Slices of Bread

To compare, here’s a photo of my regular toaster and my new long slot toaster, each containing a slice of bread taken from the same loaf. The bread here is a supermarket own brand cheap loaf. You can see the additional 1.5cm spare capacity on the front (long slot) toaster, which you need for larger sliced loaves, or for toaster bags! By comparison, the regular toaster only just fits a slice of bread.

Why do they make such small toasters? It’s not rocket science is it 🙂

Tips When Buying a Long Slot Toaster:

• Ask yourself if you want a long slot toaster, or actually want a 4-slice toaster with two very long slots.
• Look to see if any reviews mention longer slices, or Warburtons by name.
• Do reviews mention other items you toast, such as crumpets, or scones?

Ideally one might go browsing in shops to buy a new toaster, but these days there seem to be fewer opportunities and fewer products available to touch and to hold, with more retailers relying on their online store and people simply clicking…. sometimes even buying a toaster’s become quite hard 🙂

Toasted Sandwich Fillings

Now my new toaster’s arrived and my toaster bags fit…. I will start having more toasted sandwiches! Here are some toasted sandwich filling ideas:

• Cheese and onion
• Cooked bacon and cheese
• Cooked bacon and baked beans
• Cheese and baked beans
• Samosa wrap
• Homemade garlic bread
• Nutella and banana
• Cinnamon toast.

Fish finger toasties, cook the fish fingers in one bag, then transfer the cooked fish fingers to a clean bag to toast

Not Just for Bread!

You can use the toastie bags to cook other products too, how about these:

• Use wraps instead of bread
• Use waffles, savoury or sweet, instead of bread
• Filled pitta breads

Other Food You Can Cook in Toaster Bags

You can cook other food in a toaster bag, they are not just for making toasted sandwiches! Here are some ideas to get you thinking.. maybe to whip up more interesting lunches at work if you’ve a small kitchen area with a toaster available! An extra benefit of using a toaster bag at work is you’re not grimacing at the hygiene of co-workers, nor responsible/blamed for the toaster being mucky!

• Reheat cooked/chilled vegetable samosas
• Reheat cooked/chilled onion bhajis
• Fish fingers
• Small/flat vegetable or chicken nuggets
• Small/thin beef burgers
• Smaller/thin fishcakes
• Heat up cooked hash browns
• A small portion of oven chips
• Reheat a leftover portion of pizza
• Reheat leftover onion rings from last night’s takeaway!
• Heat up hot cross buns.
• Reheat leftover kebab meat (I make slow cooker kebabs so this is an ideal way to reheat the meat!)