Dialogue: A burning desire for perfect toast

By GARTH GEORGE

"Man does not live on bread alone ... " says the Bible, but I am glad that it does provide a significant proportion of my daily sustenance. It would, indeed, be a strange world without this staple of staples.

Bread has been an indispensable part of our diet almost from the time when man - if you want to believe we are descended from apes - came down from the trees.

I rather think that it was invented by Adam when he was chucked out of the Garden of Eden and had to work for a crust. He must have discovered that grain grasses could be stored over winter and used to make bread.

Leavened and unleavened, it certainly played a large part in the life and traditions of the Jews throughout the Old Testament, and it has had a special significance for Christians since Jesus used it as a potent symbol at the Last Supper.

In the Stone Age, according to an internet site devoted to the history of bread, people made solid cakes from stone-crushed barley and wheat. A millstone used for grinding corn has been found that is thought to be 7500 years old.

Loaves and rolls more than 5000 years old have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs and wheat has been found in pits where human settlements flourished 8000 years ago.

And as one who believes that bread isn't bread unless it is white, I was chuffed to discover that the Greeks and Romans liked their bread white. Whiteness was one of the main tests of the quality of bread at the time of Pliny (AD70), who wrote, among other things: "The wheat of Cyprus is swarthy and produces a dark bread; for which reason it is generally mixed with the white wheat of Alexandria."

About 400 years earlier, the philosopher Plato pictured the ideal state in which men lived to a healthy old age on wholemeal bread ground from a local wheat. His contemporary, Socrates, however, suggested that this proposal meant the whole population would be living on pig-food. I go along with Socrates.

I have always loved bread, in all its white forms, and what set me off on this tangent is that at last, after more than 50 years of trying, I have finally been able to produce perfect toast, by which I mean that which is evenly browned (or fawned in my case) from crust to crust and to the same colour on both sides.

I recall the days of the first electric toasters, in which the bread had to be carefully watched lest it burn, and it did more often than not since children have a limited attention span.

And even if I did manage to keep it in mind, and turn it at just the right moment, it was always toasted in the middle and still white round the edges. Then came pop-up toasters, of which I've owned many over the years. Not one of them has ever toasted evenly on both sides, not even the most modern model which I have now.

My answer to that, in my life-long quest for perfect toast, was to risk a blister by flipping the bread in the toaster half way through without interrupting its cycle. But there was still the problem of its being cooked in the middle and raw round the edges.

But not today, thanks to a small but busy hot bread shop and home cookery in the old-fashioned (and, therefore, comfortable) Glenmall at Glen Eden to which I resorted almost by accident one day not long ago and from which I now buy all my bread (and buns and cakes).

I have not thus far met the maestro of breadmaking in the Top Well Bakery, but I suspect he is the head of the Asian family who operate it, including mum, son and daughters.

Daily he bakes a steam pan sandwich loaf which can be bought sliced or unsliced and which is always cooked to perfection - that is lovely and pale. It is a slightly differently shaped loaf from the mass-produced stuff and has the added benefit of being about half the price.

In texture and taste his bread is the best I have tasted since the days when I used to get told off for picking at the half-loaf on the way home from the grocer, except for some freshly baked Maori bread I had on a marae a year or two back.

And, using that indispensable piece of equipment, the electric carving knife, I can cut it to whatever thickness I want, which is several millimetres wider than the mass-producers favour.

The result is perfect, golden toast, which is as much a tribute to this master of breadmaking as it is to the precise thickness to which it is cut and the sophistication of the toaster into which I place it and simply wait until it pops.

Incidentally, the rest of the quotation that began this column is " ... but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God" - spiritual food that has always been, and remains, perfect.

* garth_george@nzherald.co.nz