JWM Magazine - Summer 2017

But these chef-approved tricks banish soggy sauces and burnt bread for good.

Use the best bread. Some eggy, rich breads—challah or brioche, for example—have a hard time standing up to sauce. Others, like ciabatta or pugliese, can be mined with holes that let juicy or runny toppings slip through. The most versatile bets include rustic country-style breads, multigrain, rye, whole wheat, levain (a subtle sourdough) and Pullman bread.

And remember: The better your bread, the better your toast.

Think before you slice. Though it’s something of a matter of preference, restaurateur Alice Waters says, “the critical thing is never to have the toast be too thick. You almost always want the layer of ingredients to be thicker than the toast.”

Respect the broiler. Toasting bread under a broiler delivers an excellent char and depth of flavor, says food writer Raquel Pelzel—and lets you heat any toppings. If you’re topping-free, flipping the bread two-thirds of the way through lets the reverse side dry out a bit, so it can stand up to any saucy additions.

But whatever you do, don’t walk away from toast that’s under the broiler—it can go from perfect to incinerated in 30 seconds.

“There’s nothing sadder than the smell of burnt toast,” Pelzel says.

Freeze for freshness. While professional bakers might give this the side-eye, freezing freshly cut bread slices in sealed plastic bags can help keep them from going stale. When you’re ready to enjoy, stick the frozen slice directly in the toaster or under the broiler (without defrosting first) and cook until you arrive at your desired level of brownness. Limit freezer time to a few weeks—so make sure to label your bags with the date you froze the bread.

sugar and eggs and flavoring it with pandan”—an aromatic leaf. The
traditional preparation is two slices of well-browned white bread spread
with kaya jam and sandwiched around a thick pat of cold butter. “It’s
super-delicious,” Di Salvo says. “It’s a great combination of flavors that
stays on your palate for quite a while.”
No discussion of toast is complete without mentioning one of the
trendiest foods of the past decade. While the act of pairing avocados
with toasted bread has probably occurred as long as the two ingredients
have co-existed, the first documented appearance of avocado toast was
in the early 1990s, when Australian chef Bill Granger added it to the
menu of his Sydney café, bills. His version is the classic: a slice of rustic
bread, mashed avocados, a squeeze of citrus, sea salt and chili flakes, a
drizzle of olive oil. “It was on the menu for 15 years—always a steady
but small seller,” says Granger. “Then about eight years ago sales started
to climb, and by the time we opened our first restaurant in London five
years ago, it was almost as popular as scrambled eggs. I have no idea
what cultural or food zeitgeist made avocado toast a new millennial
breakfast classic, but it’s now up there with pancakes, eggs and cereal.”
As avocado toast has crossed continents and infiltrated menus world-
wide, it has developed in surprising and delicious ways. New iterations
may incorporate a poached or soft-boiled egg; salad greens, herbs or
thinly sliced radishes; or sesame seeds and flakes of nori seaweed. At the

JW Marriott Mussoorie Walnut Grove Resort & Spa in Northern India, Executive Chef Sidharth Bhardwaj delivers a regional spin, placing a mix of julienned bell peppers, onions and mint chutney atop toasted multigrain bread and layering on avocado, sour cream and cilantro.

ut why this moment in time for toast to strike such a chord?

Alice Waters, owner of the iconic Chez Panisse restaurant
in Berkeley, California, and mother of the modern farm-to-
table movement, says the appeal all comes back to the bread:
“Delicious, real bread is something universally loved that gets people’s
attention,” she says. “The aroma, the flavor, the texture—there’s a rea-
son it’s called the staff of life.” Perhaps, then, the ascendance of artisanal
bread accounts for the toast boom; if you have a beautiful loaf of freshly
baked bread, Waters says, you want to use it over many meals, and toast
becomes a practical way to give it new life on day two—or three. “You
can cover up a lot of errors in bread by grilling it,” she says.

For Waters’ favorite toast, she thinly slices a levain, baguette or whole-wheat bread and browns it well over a grill or on a grate above a gas burner on the stove. “Then rub the toast with a clove of garlic and drizzle it with good olive oil,” she says. It can work all on its own, topped with whatever vegetables are in season, or even as a hearty stand-in for pasta in a soup broth: “Toast transforms it into a full-on meal.” And this is one of the other great joys of toast that may account for its current popularity: its economy. “Chefs are always thinking about waste in the kitchen,” says Pelzel. “With toast, you can stretch out small amounts of ingredients—a little leftover soup, a quarter of an avocado, some crab, whatever you have—and when you put them on a piece of toasted bread, it becomes something delicious and complete and relatively inexpensive.” And we can all toast to that. [