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.