My relationship with…toast. Part Two: 2 Toast 2 Furious.
A surprising return to a world where everything’s made up and the points don’t matter.
Who would have thought you could write two blog posts about toasted bread, but here we are. This is the follow up to my original blog post about toast, which explored more thoughts and feelings than you would expect from a piece about slightly burnt bread. If you haven’t read that post, I suggest having a read of it here. If you don’t want to read it because reading another blog post about toast is dumb, you’re right. It is dumb. What I can do is summarise most of my thoughts and feelings from the last blog post into the sentence below.
It’s difficult to quantify at times, but I really hate toast.
My return to this topic was driven by many things. I recently read an article about burnt toast halting play in an Australian domestic cricket match because it set off the fire alarms at the ground. This is truly a crime against all the things that cricket stands for, and probably a crime against many that it doesn’t. I just imagine Nathan (Nice) ‘Garry’ Lyon in the dressing room, watching his batsmen put the Queensland bowlers to the sword, desperate for an easy snack. Given that he opted to make himself some toast, one can assume that no easy snack appeared. He puts it in and the machine pops the toast out, but it’s underdone (something I highlighted previously as extremely easy to do). A piece of bread so desperate to remain bread that it’s fought against the elements* to get out of the toaster early and deliver a ‘not as bad as it could be but still bad’ experience as underdone toast. Lyon, not satisfied with this, decided to go round two in the toaster and kill off any chance that this piece of bread had to live a fulfilling life. He gets distracted by the sound of leather on willow in the middle, having complete disregard for human and toast life by leaving the bread in there too long. Smoke billows from the toaster, all around the surrounding rooms setting off a chain reaction like never seen at a cricket ground before. The fire alarms go crazy, the sprinklers rain down upon anyone unfortunate enough to be caught up and the whole stand is evacuated. A whole day of play is lost**.
There are two things in my life that are sure: I love cricket and I hate toast. This event was a crossover in my life that I did not think possible until now. While a motivating factor, it’s not the real reason we’ve returned to the blog today.
The more pertinent and likely reason that I’ve returned to this topic is simple: people keep asking me about it. I understand that not liking toast so vehemently is well, weird. The only reason I wrote the original blog post is because my friend Helen commented on my Medium description, where I list toast as a dislike (I might have undersold that a bit). I’ve had countless conversations with people who have, or haven’t, read the blog post about why I don’t like toast. Maybe the worst experience of this was while I was managing a field project, one of the consultants I was working with provided a dramatic reading of my blog…to everyone on site. Including the client. Maintaining any air of authority was a little tough after that.
The hardest thing I’ve had to think about over the last 9 months in the toast-o-sphere is what forms of toast are acceptable, and what are not. For the regular person, this is a question that doesn’t matter. But for someone like me who doesn’t like toast, giving a bit away in some areas is tough.
I closed off my last blog post by saying that I enjoyed toasted sandwiches, and ‘croutons can fuck right off’. I stand by this. I could provide a comprehensive description of why I do and don’t like each format of toast, but that sounds like a great third instalment of this blog series. For now, I’ll provide you a list of toasted items that I can consider passable and not passable. Please feel free to critique any and all of the below items. If you have any other items of the toasted form that you enjoy and I haven’t listed, please pass them on for consideration.
Passable
Croque Monsieur, Grilled Cheese (sandwich or singular), Toasted Sandwiches, Lightly Grilled Sandwich
Not Passable
Toast (of any descript or variety), Croutons, Crispy Garlic Bread, Fried Bread, Mini Toast (seriously this shit should be banned worldwide)
I have excluded French toast from the above because honestly, I still don’t know how I feel about it and it’s too hard to call either way. I’ve left myself a bit of room in the above to add different variations of toast where appropriate, but I think you get the general idea of where I’m going. If you don’t, here’s a couple of simple formulas that will allow you to better understand what toasted items I might or definitely won’t enjoy.
(Bread x Toasted) + Flavour = Not Passable
(Bread + Flavour) x Toasted = Passable
If the bread is toasted or grilled in conjunction with other flavours such as cheese or condiments, the bread can take on a new form that can be enjoyed by even me. If the bread is toasted and then things like cheese or condiments are added post-toast, this is just no good. Why do people subject others to such pain? Hopefully these simple formulas go some way to understanding my brain and how it relates to toast.
The obvious exception to the rule here is crispy garlic bread. I just fucking hate it, and no delicious garlic butter can save it.
I’ll leave you with research done by the British Food Standards Agency (BFSA). Research shows that toasted bread slices may contain benzopyrene and high levels of acrylamide, a carcinogen generated during the browning process. The darker the surface colour of the toast, the higher its concentration of acrylamide. The BFSA suggests that if having toast, the bread should be toasted to the lightest colour acceptable. Want to stay healthy and not die from the things I described above that I actually have no idea of the effect? Don’t eat toast. Simple.
*I’m really stoked about the element pun.
**dramatisation, they only lost half an hour and play promptly resumed.
