Real question – why is avocado toast so popular?
I no longer choose to live my life in such a way that I am beefing with foodstuffs I don’t fully understand, but when it comes to avocado toast I can no longer stay silent. I simply fail to see how the components of avocado toast enhance each other. In a well-conceived foodstuff, there is interplay between the disparate but complimentary flavor profiles each of the ingredients brings to the table.
To keep things avocado-related, briefly consider chips and guacamole. A good guacamole is fatty umami from the avocado, acidic from the lime juice, crunchy and a little sweet from the red onion and tomato, earthy from the cilantro, and maybe even a little spicy if you’re feeling frisky. But the primary flavors are fatty, acidic, and umami, and these three things together need nothing quite so much as they need a salty, ever-so-lightly-sweet-but-also-mostly-neutral base to operate upon, and hey, check it out, I’ve just described a good tortilla chip. Thus, we may reflect on the splendor of chips and guac.
But avocado toast doesn’t really have this interplay. There’s fatty, umami avocado (and salt and acid, because let’s face it, avocado doesn’t taste like much of anything without both salt and citrus juice) and…toast. Toast is plenty alright for most things, but it doesn’t have too much going on by itself, and neither does avocado, really. Thus, while the two main ingredients are theoretically existing in a unified state, they’re really just lying together.
Listen, my point is not to say avocado toast is stupid, and you’re stupid for eating it. It can make sense if you’re at home, foraging for breakfast, and you’ve got an avocado and some bread. (Paying $8-$10 for it at a restaurant I find a bit sillier, but as ever I’m not your supervisor so if that’s what you want, go to town.) It’s perfectly acceptable, and if you offer it to me I will accept and eat it, and be grateful to have it. I will not fling the plate frisbee-style towards the nearest wall in the style of the pissy, man-baby internet nerd rage that has made me ashamed of most of the things I thought I like in the past decade.
My point is you can do better. With a little extra planning, you can grab some tortillas and make egg and avocado breakfast tacos. Or you can have normal butter and jam toast (or, for that matter, PB&J toast, the most exalted of toast preparations). Or hell, you can just make guacamole for breakfast and grab some chips and go berzerk. There’s no judgment here; do what you want, but be sure you know what that is, you know?
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