If you’re British then you’ll know about toast. I mean if you come from other places you’ll be aware of the concept. It’s not like we’re the only ones to discover that you can heat-up bread and it transforms from bland and floppy into a crusty sensation. So other people may know about toast but British people know about toast.
We use it like other cultures don't. Beans on toast for example, is criminally underrated. If it were anything but British it would be sold to us for £10 a plate from an edgy looking, graffiti laden hipster food truck and hailed as the next great street food. If we figured out a way to re-brand that and export it to the world we’d be in business.
Of course the main issue with toast, is the toaster itself. What a machine. We’ve come a long way from heating bread on a stick over some fire - now we have little boxes to toast our bread, with either 2, 4 or even industrial 8 slots. The problem is - the dials don’t make fucking sense. A typical toaster has dials 0-10 on it. But what do they mean? Are they time? Unlikely, even before phones rotted our minds and distracted us from every fleeting moment alone with our thoughts, or god forbid boredom - you never had to wait 10 minutes for your toast. If you have your toaster on for 10 minutes your house will be burnt, much less your Warburton’s extra toastie. The weird numbers seem to represent some vague, ephemeral ‘level of toastiness’. Adding to the frustration is the lack of ‘level of toastiness’ ubiquity.
Yes it’s 2022 and we still don’t have ubiquitous toaster dials1. Between Breville, Smeg and the rest of the toast giants, we still don’t have a steady system. Go to someone else’s house and you face toast jeopardy. You don’t know what to expect, is the 3 actually enough here? I’m a 5 at home, but what’s the conversion rate. Play it safe with a 4 and you can always assess and go again? Nobody needs that kind of stress in the morning. Especially if you’re sleeping in another house, which means you’ll have had to suffer that one fucking loud clock that every room that’s not yours seems to have.
But my gripes with toasters don’t end there. They're not even all the same size, or crucially, depth. Toast is a somewhat known quantity, we know how big bread is. Sure you get some tall loafs and there are those embarrassing little small ones for old people or depressed people on low carb diets who have to ration their bread intake before they leave for Spain in a month. In general though, we know how big the bread bit needs to be. And yet some machines are too small to hold a piece horizontally so you are forced to insert it vertically, leaving the head poking out the top, like an NBA player driving a Mini convertible. Meaning you end up with your food having tan lines, or having to balance toasting and rotating (so both ends get toasted), whilst not burning the middle. Again too much stress for a morning.
We’ve evolved beyond the toaster too, we have toastie machines now. I’m not sure if this is as big elsewhere as in the UK but they are amazing. They can do everything. Cook meat, make toasties, garlic bread, fry ups - anything… All for about 2-3 weeks before you get sick of it and chuck it in the cupboard to be left untouched, only to repeat the cycle again in 6 months time. Smartly at least these devices don’t bother with dials, it’s all in the art of the timing. It’s on until it’s off, and the quality of output depends on the chef. ‘Chef’ might be a push for someone putting food in a toastie machine, but Subway call their staff ‘sandwich artists’, so it’s title inflation all the way down sadly.
So while toast is great, toasters are shite. We’ve got the technology to talk to the lights in our house, watch a live stream from mars or scan and track the faces of a billion people (depends how authoritarian you feel). And yet, we still haven’t mastered the toaster. This feels like how we put man on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases, we’re letting global warming and wars and other boring things distract from the real problems in life. Because at the end of the day if the planet gets too hot, we’ll all be toast.
Whoever said this column doesn’t attack the real problems?
Give up the toast
I laughed pretty much the whole way down. That said, our toaster is decent. It's still got the stupid ass dials but at least you can pull the bread up to check as it goes.
Somehow my Mum still burns everything though. Old habits I guess.
Have you ever heard of this toaster from the 40's?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y