Cockle Toasties

Cockles are not a favourite of mine. Since the Kraken, legendary triple-decker fish-finger sandwich which premièred last year, we have come to feel they might need a solo outing. They were a pretty hard sell in the Kraken, undeniably improving the flavour, but making many fish-finger fans sad. We had contaminated an otherwise delicious sandwich with weird little snails. Cockle fans, on the other hand, were delighted. The cockle toastie is the time to shine. I was dubious.

The recipes are simple, to give us a starting point.

The Warm Your Cockle Toastie

• Pip’s Hot Sauce
• Cheddar
• Cockles

The Tomato Your Cockle Toastie

• Sliced Tomatoes
• Sliced mozzarella
• Cockles

Taste.

Warming your cockles with hot sauce is not recommended. Not with cheese anyway. The smoky, delicious tang of the hot sauce is utterly lost on the weird little bivalves, and is better used in almost any other combination. 1/10

Tomatoing you cockles is a better plan. Without the heat you can taste some of the sea, and mozzarella is milder than our usual wallop of mature cheddar. It’s not an instant classic. The general consensus suggested this toastie was still missing something big. Barny is considering anchovies. As that would be combining two of the ingredients like least in the entire universe, I’d have to disagree, but I would never stand in the way of progress. As it is though: 4/10

Appeal

It’s an unpopular ingredient in a really average toastie. I’d rather not. 2/10

Suitability as a signature.

There are frozen horse-meat burgers from the dubious-looking multi purpose unit I’d rather have as my signature…

Maybe not, but you get my drift. 0/10

Difficulty Rating

Nothing difficult here, unless you count eating it.

The idea of cockles is not totally out the window, but the cockle toastie needs to be tackled as a long-term labour of love on Barny’s part, preferably without getting me involved until he’s found something that works. This one is heading back to the drawing board indefinitely.