Slow Brown Toast

My current brother in-law has taken to home sliced bread for his toast.  He likes my sister to slice the bread [as if he'd do it - women's work!] as thick as will fit into the toaster, if not thicker.  She has taken to grilling the toast in the stove.  She has to keep an eye on it but she is, as usual, fussing around with a million distractions [where does E@L get it from?], so she keeps the the heat down a bit.  She re-aligns the bread every so often to ensure that it is evenly done on both sides.  When it is ready she brings it out, butters it, jams it and delivers it to his highness.  His highness is not there this morning but the sister had now got into a habit.

E@L was watching this. 

"That's how they make kaya toast," he said.  His sister looked interested.

"Oh, the famous kaya toast! [She reads this blog]  They grill it?" she asked

"Yes, just they way you do, sorta, except the grill is underneath.  With kaya toast though, they slice it through the middle."

"What do you mean?"

So E@L took one of the thick freshly toasted slices and showed her how to cut it horizontally.  He had never done this before, only watched in fascination a hundred times. OK it was not so fascinating after the six or seventh time, but you get the idea.  He has seen it done, but never tried for himself. Using something resembling a bread knife [E@L's mum has a collection of mostly absolutely crap knives.  However, this was the one they advertised about forty years ago on TV, saying it would never go blunt - they sawed the end of a shoe and then sliced a tomato.  They were right, it is still sharp.  Great design, bad business plan.  Where is the inbuilt obsolesence?] he was able to manage the horizontal slice easily.  Might open a kaya toast place in Geelong?  He showed her how they spread the jam (he used her quince jam, fruit from her own tree, she make) on one inner side and how they dobbed on the butter in strategic places on the other.  

He placed the two halves together and cut them in half.  He passed one half to his sister and she bit into it.

"Oh my God," she said.  "It's crunchy on both sides."

The reallization of this hit E@L.  Of course, that is one of the great things about kaya butter toast.  It is not soggy.  He has been obsessed with toast-racks to let the temperature drop a bit to keep his toast from producing condensation on the cutting board or the plate and going soggy underneath from the moisture.  He loves crunchy toast.  Kaya toast is crunchy, he considered this revelation again, on both sides.  

He needs to buy unsliced bred and cut it thick to make his own at home from now on.   What a dolt.

Just need to borrow some stockings for the kopi.

~~~~~~~~~

E@L typed this at a Ya Kun Kaya Toast outlet in Funan Centre on a new Logitech Bluetooth keyboard on the Motorola Xoom. Once you get the correct keyboard settings (!) it works fine. It was designed for the iPad, but you know what?  Fuck tethering.

E@L