The Toast Cycle

The Twenty-Sixth of July Two Thousand and Eleven. Tuesday.

I have a tricky old time of it some days, living as I do at the frontiers of science. Talking about Paul Young the other day put me in mind of some research I performed in the latter years of the 20th Century. I recalled the 1978 hit he had with the Streetband. It was called Toast.

 
This was probably the first time I became aware of a phenomenon of nature known as The Toast Cycle. It usually manifests itself as follows.

Making toast under the grill (bonus 50 points if it's an eye-line grill) is a joy. With careful supervision you can get your toast to the exact shade of brown you require and if you don't overload the grill pan it'll crisp up nice and evenly. But keeping an eye on it is a bit tedious and inevitably, as one's attention wanders, the toast will burn. It can be scraped, but the patchy remains are never that satisfying often requiring a second toasting that also tends toward burning as you mistime how quickly the now-hot grill takes to do its work.

At some point you get fed up of this nonsense and invest in a toaster.

Which is great. Once you've mastered which setting works best for you the timer ensures that you never have to endure burnt toast. Except...

The bread doesn't always fit the slots and you often end up with corners that aren't quite toasted. It's all right, but it's not as good as it could be. So...

You return to the grill. For a while you enjoy the sheer luxury of evenly toasted bread until that dread day when you set fire to a slice of Warburton's and the cycle begins anew.

Here is a useful illustration.

If you have been affected by any of the issues raised you can ring the toast helpline... Actually, don't do that. There is a real toast helpline only in this case TOAST stands for The Obesity Awareness and Solutions Trust and I'm sure they get enough loons phoning up making jokes about eating too much toast. But if you're genuinely having trouble trying to make it, here's how courtesy of top chef-slash-mockney-slash-education-guru Jamie Oliver. No, really.

We finish today with some important philosophical questions from Red Dwarf.

More soonliest.