I went off the deep end a little bit over on @ratgirlagogo’s thread The top 20 meals Americans can make without using a recipe .
How about a light hearted discussion of how you like to make toast and why - emphasis on the why. Compare and contrast where possible.
That article was written in a very silly way. Who knows why. I dislike blaming young people for why these articles exist.
Ah, TOAST…I know and love you well. Making toast enjoyed with a soft boiled egg was at the heart of my breakfast meal from a very young and impressionable age. Learning how to prepare both another rite of passage. While I have my favorite: tan setting, rye toast topped with a jammy egg…I buy and bake bread weekly today because it is easy, simple, comforting food. I don’t care for light toasts or doughy breads any longer because much better choices exist but I don’t go a day without some form of toasted bread. Even the air fryer makes a nice piece of toast.
Ah - that’s how MUCH to toast. How about HOW to toast? Slot toasters? Toaster oven? Broiler? Dry skillet? The camping toasters? A plumbing torch a la Julia Child?
We make toast for sandwiches, a recent interest, and recurrent during tomato season.
Picture 3 is the rate limiting step for us. How do you store bread? This is an annoying alternative to the freezer.
All of the above and I did mention the air fryer (grin).
We use a wine cooler for storing bread. We also leave out half loaves to use Each week. Rotation system. .
It used to take months to get through a loaf, but lately we’ve been eating a few sandwiches.
I enjoy sandwiches of all kinds but we also make bread salad, breadcrumbs, stuffing and over french onion soup so bread is something we use Up pretty easily.
John Thorne has a (typically) fascinating essay on toast in his book Pot on the Fire:
https://www.amazon.com/Pot-Fire-Further-Exploits-Renegade/dp/0865475644
His insight being that the main reason that the English in particular had developed such a cult around toast (he gives many literary references) is that before the development of high gluten flour bread was so wet and dense that it pretty much required toasting. You can look at the book at archive.org.
Some nice Italian bread sliced . Then grilled over oak wood . Don’t burn it . Remove. Drizzle with the best olive oil you can find . Sprinkle with Cyprus flake sea salt .
For many years I had a small toaster oven. Although it was fine for heating up leftover pizza it didn’t make toast very well - very uneven. When I moved onto my boat on which power management requires some thought I got a small camping toaster. This is a metal contraption that makes a sort of teepee out of the bread to toast over a gas burner. That thing was so horrible it made the old toaster oven look magic. I learned to make toast in a dry skillet which works well but takes a while as you only toast one side of a slice of bread at a time. You really can’t walk away. It is brilliant for grilled cheese sandwiches though. When my wife and I set up housekeeping we choose a slot toaster which makes near perfect toast.
I have occasionally made toast in quantity under the broiler or for things like burgers on the barbecue grill.
There’s toast and there’s toast.
We make breakfast toast in a Breville slot toaster. Very simple. Stagger downstairs, turn on water boiler, turn on news channel, open bread drawer, pull our choice of bread, drop in slot. Pour water over coffee. Wake up.
But we make savory toast by grilling homemade country bread on a homemade stainless wire rack over the gas flame on stove. Turning frequently to avoid hot spots. Anoint with EVOO and or bruschetta toppings of choice.
Sounds delicious on all counts.
I’m a toaster oven girl through and through (partially because I don’t have a microwave)… every morning I have 2 slices of rye toast, and halfway through the process I put the butter on (using my butter spreader, another item I can’t live without) because I love having the butter toasted into the bread. 
I don’t eat toast at home as much as I’d like, but I will chime in to say I’m not especially enamored of toast made under/over a gas flame. Dunno why exactly (I assume, very possibly incorrectly) that it’s because gas flames generate noticeable moisture, which interferes with the process, however slightly.) At various times in my life I’ve used a toaster oven (flatbed), but prefer a decent slot toaster, and don’t even mind flipping the bread around mid-cycle to get it more “perfectly” even. My ideal degree-of-toasting is a “medium golden brown”, but as often as not, that’s aspirational, and I’ll settle for almost anything from “light tan overall” to “slightly burnt and scraped”. On the other hand, weak toasting (of the sort that’s common in the few neighborhood diners that still exist here), with a couple of stripes of moderate tan against a background of still-soft, white background is an abomination.
