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. [
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