Toast: The Next Big Thing

Get ready-- the Next Big Thing in the food world is here.

And it's Toast.

Just bread that's been browned a little bit. And sometimes it is accompanied by a fried egg or vegetables but the star of the show is the bread. Toasted. 

After reading this article, I was hardly surprised. It seemed obvious, even. Toast is the ultimate regression from high-end dining. Given the contemporary boom of the hipster culture, this food takes us back to the days of Mark Twain, the granddaddy of the hipsters.  I read Andrew Beahrs' book "Twain's Feast"  about a year ago. One of the most distinctive descriptions I can remember is Twain's nostalgia for milk toast: freshly toasted bread soaked in warm, fresh milk; maybe with sugar and butter. 

(Check out the book from Forbes Library. It will make you crave coffee and rich cream despite a typical aversion to coffee. You will feel one with Twain.)

The toast we're talking about is not Wonder Bread toast. While one of the varieties may still be white bread toast, the white bread will have been locally made, probably from a sourdough (so local yeast), with locally milled wheat, and locally sourced eggs and butter. The ingredients each come from a pointed location, and the final compilation is a story of each location. As this article advocating for us to reconsider toast would suggest, toast's appeal goes back a long way. Only now are we elevating its status in light of its simple history. Toast came from day old bread; now fresh bread does not pass the intermediate step of aging and becoming stale. Bakeries make entire loaves for immediate slicing and browning. Instead of a necessary means to stretch food yet another day, toast is now an attempt to experience nostalgia immediately. 

They sell toast with butter at Northampton Coffee. Their bread is a sourdough from Tart bakery up the street, and their butter is Cabot butter from Vermont. The bread was tangy and spongy and crisp. It was creamy on top in the way that only really good salted butter can add to taste and texture. Photo by me.

Eating toast is akin to taking a trip down memory lane. It is both a journey back to a time like Twain's where mothers would make milk toast regularly, and a more immediate trip to our own experiences with simplicity in the kitchen. Prepare yourself to spend the equivalent dollar amount for an entire loaf of bread on two pieces of toast with butter. Perhaps this movement serves as a jarring cry to value the basics. Toast could not be more a perfect representation of this modern tendency toward natural sophistication as we hold the power to decide what to put atop this recently revived canvas with butter.