The joy of toasting:

Last night David asked me if I wanted my hamburger bun toasted.

I told him of course I did. I couldn't believe he didn't know my feelings about toasted breads. We've been married over a whole year and I have no idea how I managed to neglect informing him of an entire tenet of my sandwich ideology.

I believe that all sandwiches are better with toasted bread or a bun. I challenge you to present me with sandwich that a toasted bun will not complement or improve.

Peanut butter and jelly, ham and swiss, BLT, clubs and of course all burgers. I'll have to admit that upon seeing the burger from the Spotted Pig in NY , I immediately wanted to drop what I was doing and go to New York City to obtain that sandwich.

Hamburger buns, in my opinion, are always toasted. Untoasted buns belong at company picnics or family reunions where someone brings in a bunch of JTM frozen hockey puck burgers and generic ketchup and your 16 year old 5^th cousin overcooks the burgers into charcoal.

Without a toasted bun, your hamburger is failing to live up to its full potential...much like your 16 year old 5^th cousin.

Toasting the bread on a sandwich or burger ups the deliciousity by at least +5. The toasting brings out the natural sweetness of wheat breads and creates a lovely texture in white breads.

In peanut butter sandwiches, the crunchy texture complements the gooey peanut butter and jelly. Why do you think a grilled cheese or toasted raisin bread, or a Panini is so irresistibly delicious!? Not just because they are usually filled with fabulous, fresh ingredients, but because they are toasted. The bread is exposed to varying degrees of heat, God smiles, light springs forth from the heavens and the bread becomes crunchy.

I acknowledge that one may have to make sacrifices for toasting. Maybe sometimes your club sandwich cuts up the roof of your mouth, or you get a piece of toasted bread stuck in your teeth and no one tells you about it all day. These things are a small price to pay for the yummy-in-my-tummy goodness that toasted breads bestow.

It is probably my love of most things toasted that caused me to kill my Dad's toaster. I was trying to make pop tarts and overlooked a rather important organic detail—glucose is extremely flammable. And pop-tarts are chock full of high fructose corn syrup. We needed a better toaster anyway.

So remember: Thou shalt toast thy hamburger buns or risk a subpar burger experience.