Toast is a wonderful accompaniment to a meal. When I am ordering breakfast in a restaurant, I will often order toast. It’s great for sopping up egg yolk and then a little jam turns it into the perfect sweet dessert. And for lunch, what is a BLT without toast?
I like my toast dark. The perfect toast, to me is a uniform dark brown, though I’m fine with a little black if that is what it takes to get the rest of the slice dark.
But if I don’t specify “well toasted”, it seems that most of the time I get pieces of bread that have been dried out through the application of heat, but nothing more. Maybe there will be a little patch of yellowish brown somewhere on the bread, but that is about it. And sending toast back and waiting while the eggs get cold somehow defeats the purpose.
Sometimes even the “well toasted” doesn’t do the job, so lately I’ve been telling the server “well toasted- and I don’t mind a little black”, which seems to do the job, but why should it be so hard?
I have formed the hypothesis that restaurants get more complaints from people who see a bit of dark brown or even a tiny bit of black on their toast than they do from folks like me, so they serve what are essentially warm slices of dried bread. But maybe there is another explanation?
So I’m asking the questions:
1)** What constitutes “perfect toast”?** (please use the poll)
How do you order toast in a restaurant to get perfect toast?
in most places you don’t get to be specific although you can mention youd like it light or dark ….same for English muffins…
I get biscuits with gravy instead of either if offered tho or just biscuits ……if not
I agree about the dried-out white bread. Yuck. I think restaurants speed up the toasting process for expediency reasons. Although my inner metrology scientist just alerted me that perhaps they aren’t calibrating their toaster sufficiently frequently.
I usually don’t order toast in restaurants (carbs and all that) and I get fruit instead.
I think restaurants that serve toast in any quantity use conveyor-belt type machines designed to cook a lot of it, rapidly (this one, which might be an extreme example, boasts a 2400 slices per hour capacity - a slice every 1.5 seconds), and set it to a setting which will run as fast as possible while satisfying most people.
Here’s the nutritional facts page from Denny’s (.pdf) The seasonal fruit selection doesn’t seem to offer that much of an advantage over toast (except for sourdough).
I keep forgetting to specify, and just today got a pair of white slices with my spinach/onion scramble. Not only was it barely toasted, I hadn’t seen White Bread in a while (most places I go, wheat bread’s the default, or they ask “White, wheat, rye or English muffin?”).
But if I can get a biscuit, mmmm… stopped at Cracker Barrel for the first time in years, and the basic egg breakfast came with grits, and biscuits with apple butter.
I specified option 2 - light brown - but it’s more an aspiration than a requirement. anything out of 1, 2, 3 is fine with me
My parents don’t consider any toast properly cooked until there’s charcoal somewhere on it, so I understand the difficulty of conflicting requirements. When I’m staying with them we can work it out by setting the toaster to my setting, and they just do two rounds of toasting.
The fact is, though, that you can always cook toast more, but you can’t *uncook *it. So it pays to err on the side of charcoal-free
Bear and mind that not all bread browns equally, and that the breads restaurants keep at hand aren’t the same kinds as you have at home. Restaurants that also make French toast, for instance, will hold brioche or challah - which make the best French toast by far - and while they also make decent dry toast, they don’t brown that well.
I voted that nicely caramelized is perfect, but if much prefer a little charcoal at the edges to untoasted toast. I’m just resigned to getting underdone toast at restaurants. Maybe I should start asking for it dark.
For the most part, restaurants take no care with toast, and they aren’t really set up to meet individual preferences. As stated above, they throw the bread onto the belt and take whatever comes out. And if it’s a busy time, that belt is going to be set at a pretty high speed, so not a whole lot of toasting is going to be happening.
As you note, for the most part, people aren’t going to want to send their toast back and wait.
When I eat toast at home, I like to butter it while it’s still warm from the toaster, and then eat it immediately. In a restaurant, it takes way too long to get it to me, so it’s room temperature by the time it hits the table. (I have the same problem when visiting my parents. My father will kindly make toast for me, but often he’ll start it while I’m still in the shower or getting dressed. I eat it, but don’t enjoy it as much as really fresh toast.)
I am the same way about bacon. I always tell them to burn it.
At home I usually have twice toasted toast. I put it through the second short cycle right before eating so it’s buttery hot. Too bad diners don’t put toasters on the table.
That is exactly why I love eggs(over easy) and toast at home, but will never bother in in a restaurant.
The timing of the bread just out of the toaster, buttered, the egg straight from the pan, put on top of the bread, with it’s yolk immediately broken to mix with the melting butter, requires timing no mass production can manage.