The Trouble With Toasties

Thank you once again for joining us, and welcome to the Soliloquy 2012. I have already shared with you that last year was not bad, but will confide that I hope this year will be even better. We will hopefully be able to build a little notoriety locally as a food van to be reckoned with, we will perhaps strike it lucky and get a few referrals for Barny to cook in other people’s kitchens and maybe we will even secure an event.

In the meantime we have been trying perfect the street food, which is still struggling to compete with the mighty hog roast. That cunning swine, you see, has the festival market in all but the most vegetarian of scenes thoroughly catered for. Not even the beef burger stands a chance against the might of the spit-roast pig. My theory for this is that the beautiful bacon assails the senses from all sides. Sorry vegetarians, this is going to get dirty…

First, the smell. It toys with you, promising roast meat that can be eaten without a knife and fork. It flippantly suggests that there will be crackling AND meat AND possibly apple sauce.
Next the sight. Although in most cases we like our meat to be as un-animal-like as possible this is a marked exception. It is a spectacle, but a familiar one.
Then there is the taste, which is rich and succulent and varied and oddly civilized compared to a regular burger.

Lunchtime at a festival the hog roast is ten people deep, and all the rest of us can do is watch. No need to fear though, because there is our challenge. Toasties might not sound like the answer to the question, but unless you try, you will never know.

It should also be noted that we have by no means abandoned the restaurant-food-on-the-go concept, because we like it and, while it cannot compete with a hog roast, there is a time and a place for miniature pies and savoury profiteroles in everyone’s lives.

Toasties are, for the most part, a familiar comfort food containing cheese. Cheese, as we all know, is one of the marvels of any nation who ever looked at a cow/goat/sheep and seen some serious potential. Beyond that the rules are yours to make, break or generally not play by. So over the last few weeks we have been experimenting with the practicalities and pitfalls of various toasted delicacies. There is more to be done, but I have discovered something important about corned beef, mature cheddar and onion marmalade that I’m very pleased with, and Barny feels that there has been some sterling progress in the field of mozzarella, basil and Parma ham.

The current problem is speed. Each toasty takes 4 minutes to cook, and that’s generally recognised to be 3 minutes and 30 seconds longer than people want to wait, especially if there is a queue. We will therefore have to be cooking them in advance, which means that our choices are more limited, as more variety causes more waste and would drive the cost up. We need to find the three perfect flavour combinations. It’s an interesting conundrum, but one that ends in eating toasties. I do so love a challenge that ends with toasties.

It may lack the finesse of the chicken Caesar, but given an eye for timing it could be very fast to serve, would fill you up with a nostalgic memory of childhood and will deliver a hit of taste which, providing Barny has anything to do with it, will be nothing short of epic.