Easy Bread Toasting Recipes

I could live on toast. I wouldn’t need an imaginary desert island to force me to make that choice; it’s quite simply one of the most perfect foods ever invented. For what satisfies hunger better – or quicker – than a simple golden slab of toast dripping with butter? What stirs up the appetite better than wafts of yeasty bread slowly caramelising? This promise, the sublime smell, is often just as tantalising as the first bite. This book is dedicated to the enjoyment of toast in the most indulgent manner: showering the bed with crumbs and not caring that they are going to tickle you for days after.

But to truly celebrate toast in all its crisp, fluffy, charred glory, we need to liberate it from the breakfast table; release it from the shackles of the toast rack. After all, I eat toast throughout the day, most days of the year. Griddled sourdough draped with tomatoes and drizzled with grassy olive oil with a glass of Chianti makes a wonderful start to a summer’s evening, in the same way that a midnight snack of chocolate spread on hot white toast will ease you into a wintry night of sweet dreams.

I have always shunned the conformists’ ‘meat and two veg’ rule in favour of something altogether more relaxed. I get a smug glow when I settle down to a supper of soft-boiled eggs with soldiers slathered in Gentleman’s Relish and a green salad. It reminds me just how good it is to be an adult – even if that only really means having the choice to behave like a child again.

Toast has never been a friend of restraint. It needs to be generously smothered with butter or unctuous juices to save it from being dry. Dry toast is purely for when you’re sick; a good comforter. What you’re after is juices dripping into every pore of the crisp surface, whether from the oily flesh of an avocado, or the rosy juices of a rare steak. As John Thorne wrote in Pot on the Fire (2000), ‘Unbuttered toast is a substance half complete, and to be forced to eat it in that state is necessarily to feel deprived.’ I don’t advocate deprivation, especially when it comes to toast.

Toast is much more versatile than many people give it credit for. It goes way beyond the ubiquitous cheese or beans on toast (although you will find splendid versions of both these masterpieces on the pages that follow). Toasting bread transforms bread into a crisp counterfoil that is a perfect companion to almost anything, whether that is a spoonful of voluptuous lemon curd, some softly scrambled eggs or a tangle of watercress and flaky mackerel. It is equally as happy to play the supporting role to slices of pork with a punchy salsa verde, as it is stepping into the lead, to become an edible scoop for different pâtés and dips.

My only rule is that any jams, butters or homemade toppings (such as my Chocolate Hazelnut Spread (see here) need to come to room temperature before they meet the hot toast, so the heat of the toast can turn them into molten pools of deliciousness. I keep a small chunk of butter at room temperature so I don’t have to battle with butter from the fridge and don’t have to acknowledge the existence of margarine.

Whatever country you are in, there is always a toast recipe to match and they often have one common factor: they are thrifty ways of reviving bread that has seen better days. Stale bread was endemic in rural peasant life, since fresh bread was not available every day and wastage couldn’t be tolerated. Born out of this are French tartines, Italian crostini and bruschette, Spanish pintxos and the various manifestations of bread dipped in egg – eggy bread, pain perdu, torrijas or French toast, depending on where you are in the world and how you like to describe it.

This app includes:

1 simple toast

2 spreads

3 breakfast

4 veggie

5 fish

6 poultry

7 meat

8 sweet things