On a dream about hamburgers.

So I had a dream last night that I was attending some kind rambling beach/cliff party. I found myself engaged in conversation with one Jewel Staite about hamburgers.

I can't remember the majority of it, of course, as I'm terrible at remembering my dreams. But I do remember her arguing for the presence of avocado on certain burgers, calling the lipid-rich fruit 'nature's mayonnaise'.

I can't really argue that, can I?

That being said, I could really go for a havarti burger with an asiago frico, avocado, and a thick, fatty slice of applewood-smoked bacon right now.

On a plea to those that deliver fries.

It is with a heavy heart that I write these words. For I know how they will not be heard by those who need to hear it most. That this impotent cry will echo into the internet but once, then forever be lost to the silence of the years.

But say it I must.

Delivery places. Please. Please stop putting fries in clamshells.

Do you not realize what crunch is? That all it really comes down to is dehydration? Do you not know that moisture of any kind is crunch's bane?

So what, you're just going to cram those beautiful, crisp fingers of potato into an airtight motherfucking container? So that they can release steam that escapes through fucking nothing and therefore just soaks right back into the fucking fries? Don't you know that you may as well have just dumped them into a wet fucking rag soaked in your own fetid fucking urine? Can't you see that every time, every fucking time you hand that off to your customer, two fucking kittens die somewhere?

Would it fucking kill you to put them into a fucking bag? I mean, fuck.

On buttered toast.

So a while ago, Tyler asked me to write an article on why buttering bread before it was toasted made it so much more delicious. So I ventured out into the internet, trying to find the scientific reasoning for what's always been pretty common knowledge in the kitchen: A smudge of fat on bread leads to a more even, darker browning in the oven. And you know what I came up with? Jack shit.

"Well, fuck," I said as I closed my textbooks. "Looks like I'll have to think this one out." We talked about the Maillard reaction not too long ago - we know that browning leads to the development of all those delicious compounds that makes toast toasty. Crunch is, at its core, dehydration. So logically, the awesomeness of buttered toast has something to do with driving out water content on the bread's surface.

And that makes sense, really. Trying to sear a moist steak on a dry surface leads to a splotchy, inconsistent crust rather than the beautiful golden brown a little oil generates. Oil acts as a direct surface-to-surface heat application, like a liquid pan you can coat your food in (incidentally, this is why oven-fried chicken is a sham). While water has a boiling point of 212F, keeping any wet surface from getting any hotter than that so long as there's moisture to vaporize, oil can go well beyond that temperature without breaking a sweat. So to speak.

So here's my theory. When you fattify the porous surface of bread, that oil swarms the molecular structure, its naturally hydrophobic properties encasing or otherwise driving away the moisture from the surface. It obviously doesn't push the water out, or a puddle of water would form every time you smear bacon fat on your toast, but it takes up space that water vapor would otherwise trap itself in as the piece of bread heats.

Exposed to high temperatures in the absence of water, the bread essentially fries in the oven, free to develop color and crunch unfettered by the thermal shackles of the boiling point. Butter in particular is a great candidate for this, despite its ~15% water content, since the milk solids that give it its characteristic buttery flavor stand up to the short blast of high heat involved in toasting when it's buffered by the bulk of the bread.

So there you have it, buddy. Buttering bread before toasting it is delicious because butter is delicious, the Maillard reaction is delicious, and water can go suck it.


I feel like I should add a note here about buttering bread before putting it into a vertical slot toaster. Don't do it. Those heating coils are way too close, and the fat's just going to drip off the sides rather than soak into the bread. Use a little common sense here, people.