Consider the cronut. Food trends, for the most part, tend to take the form of the exotic and the unusual: a donut-croissant hybrid, goji berries, macarons, Greek yogurt, quinoa (did you know how to pronounce the name of the South American grain before 2012? No, you did not).
But the most versatile, and arguably most popular, of these new trends is something that has been gracing American plates for decades, even centuries: humble toast. Gluten is now the new gluten-free.
You’ve seen it on your Instagram feed and all over the Buzzfeed listicle-verse. Toast smeared with avocado and gently dusted with red pepper flakes. Toast topped with ricotta and zested lemon. Toast spread with hand-churned peanut butter and chia seeds.
According to foodie website Eater, the concept of artisanal toast was born at San Francisco’s Trouble Coffee and Coconut Club, where it faced immediate derision for its $4-per-slice price tag — an amount for which you could buy an entire loaf of bread — and hipster appeal. It became so popular at The Mill, another Bay Area bakery and early adopter of the trend, that it was eventually serving upward of 400 pieces of toast per day on the weekends. In 2013, VentureBeat even published an op-ed titled: “$4 Toast: Why the Tech Industry is Ruining San Francisco.”
But it was during a visit to San Francisco that local Blue Oven Bakery’s Mark Frommeyer saw firsthand the success of the elevated breakfast staple and an opportunity to not only capitalize on the trend, but also create a connection between their bakery and their farm, the lesser-known part of the business. Their new Toast Bar, open at Blue Oven’s Findlay Market stand, combines both their bread and their produce.
“It’s a way for us to say that we’re not just a bakery, we’re a farm, and we always have been a farm,” Frommeyer says.
They grow some of the toast-topping ingredients themselves, but what they don’t grow, they source them from other local farms, like jams and honeys from Bee Haven, another Findlay Market staple (which is soon to open a shared brick-and-mortar with another local, Chocolats Latour, in Northside). Toast Bar offers both sweet and savory options, like a cinnamon toast with sweet cream, or a dark rye with whipped goat cheese, microgreens and arugula pesto. Frommeyer also encourages sampling and substituting when it comes to helping you select a loaf to take home — a Chipotle for toast, if you will.
“If you don’t want to commit to buying a full loaf, we’ll get you a slice of toast and smear it with whatever you want,” he says. But what’s the difference between artisanal toast and perennial Italian favorite bruschetta? What is it that separates Toast Bar toast from, say, Sotto’s goat cheese and hazelnut-honey bruschetta? It depends on who you talk to. The word “bruschetta” comes from the Italian “bruscare,” meaning to roast over coals, and it traditionally refers to the bread, not the toppings. So all bruschetta is toast but not all toast is bruschetta.
Jill Donenfeld, Cincinnati native and author of Better on Toast, a cookbook with 70 recipes for toast and things to put on it, told The Cincinnati Enquirer that it’s all the same to her — bruschetta or open-faced sandwich. “I don’t draw a line,” she said. “It’s all toast.”
So toast or bruschetta, sweet or savory, what matters most is that this delicious trend is here to stay — and looks great on Instagram.
Blue Oven Bakery’s TOAST BAR is now open at Findlay Market on Saturdays and Sundays. More info: blueovenbakery.com.
[Find more food news and trends, including 300-plus options for every type of craving, in CityBeat’s Dining Guide here. Read the full digital edition here.]
This article appears in Oct 21-27, 2015.