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Bottom line: It genuinely makes bread taste better. If you eat toast daily and care about the experience, this is worth every won. If toast is just fuel, skip it.

I first encountered the BALMUDA The Toaster at a friend's apartment in Mapo-gu.

She'd bought it on a whim during a 쿠팡 sale, and offered to make toast when I stopped by for breakfast. She was using a GS25 convenience store baguette — the ₩1,500 kind in the crinkly plastic packaging that's perfectly edible but nobody would call remarkable.

What came out of that toaster was remarkable. Shattering crust. Impossibly moist interior. Genuine butter fragrance even though there was no butter. I stood in her kitchen and ate an entire convenience store baguette in confused silence.

I ordered the BALMUDA when I got home.

How Does the Steam Technology Work?

BALMUDA's proprietary technology involves adding 5ml of water to a tray before toasting. The machine vaporizes this water to create a steam environment inside the oven. The steam penetrates the bread's surface and locks in moisture before the heat begins crisping the exterior.

The practical result: the Maillard reaction (the browning chemistry that creates crust) happens while the bread's interior is still moist and protected. You get simultaneously crispy exterior and tender, moist interior — the combination that defines a genuinely good piece of toast.

Standard toasters deliver only heat, which drives moisture out of bread uniformly. The result is often uniformly dry toast. BALMUDA delivers heat plus humidity in a specific sequence, which is closer to what professional bakery ovens do.

Six Modes — Which Ones Actually Matter

The BALMUDA comes with six preset modes: Classic, Cheese, Sandwich, Pizza, Fermentation, and Sweet Bun.

In six months of daily use, I primarily use Classic (for toast and most breads) and Pizza (for reheating leftover delivery pizza). The Pizza mode reheats leftovers better than a microwave — the crust gets crispy while the cheese melts properly.

The Cheese mode at higher temperatures is good for open-face toasts with cheese on top. The Sandwich mode heats quickly at high temperature, useful when you just need to warm something through.

Fermentation mode is for bread dough proving — I haven't used it as I don't bake bread from scratch.

Check BALMUDA The Toaster price on Coupang →

Honest Limitations

Small capacity. Maximum two standard bread slices. If you're cooking for a family, the small footprint means multiple rounds.

Water requirement. You need to add 5ml of water before each steam toast. Most mornings this is automatic. Some early mornings it feels like an extra step. (You can skip the water and use Classic mode dry — still better than most toasters, just less dramatically different.)

Price. ₩280,000 is genuinely expensive for a toaster. You can buy a perfectly functional toaster for ₩30,000. You have to value the experience of excellent toast to justify the difference.

What Breads Work Best

Best results: French baguettes, sourdough, thick-cut Shokupan (Japanese-style white bread), croissants. The steam technology is most dramatic on breads where crispy exterior + moist interior matters most.

Decent results: standard sliced white bread, bagels, English muffins.

Less impressive (not really the BALMUDA's fault): very thin bread slices, completely dry crackers or flatbreads.

Who Should Buy It

The BALMUDA The Toaster is worth the investment if: you eat toast or bread daily, you care about food quality and experience, you appreciate Japanese design aesthetics, or you're looking for a kitchen centerpiece that also works beautifully.

Skip it if: you use a toaster occasionally, toast is purely functional for you, or budget constraints are real.

For daily bread eaters like me, it's transformed breakfast from a routine to something I actually look forward to.

Buy BALMUDA The Toaster on Coupang →

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