Honey-Butter Toast

Despite—or maybe because of—the fact that I've worked in food media for more than 20 years, I spend way more time on Cat Insta than on food social media. So, I completely missed honey-butter toast's ramp up to virality until Serious Eats' social media editor, Kelli Solomon, flagged it in one of our work Slack channels. The current iteration of the toast making the rounds—a thick, square slice of bread that's slathered with a honey-butter mixture and then baked until it develops a shatteringly crisp sweet crust—can be traced back to a version served at London's Arôme Bakery.

While the current trend might have been started by Arôme, both Kelli and culinary editor Genevieve Yam pointed out that the buzzy toast was essentially a loose riff on brick toast. "You can find brick toast in cafés in Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong," Genevieve says. "I'm not entirely sure where brick toast comes from, but I grew up eating it in cafés in Hong Kong. Similar to Hong Kong–style French toast it almost always came with a square pat of butter and a generous drizzle of condensed milk. If my friends and I were at the mall after school, that's the kind of snack we would look for."

We all agreed that the crackly slabs of toasts making the rounds online looked pretty dreamy—unlike many social media food darlings (see jalapeño dust and deboned-in-the-bag chicken)—so we set about developing our own riff with the help of our test kitchen colleague recipe Julia Levy. Through rounds of testing and tasting, Julia arrived at this crisp on the outside, soft on the inside toast with beautifully floral honey, cinnamon, and optional cardamom, topped with lightly sweetened yogurt and as much fresh fruit as you'd like. Read on for tips on making the toast and to get Julia's full recipe.

5 Tips for Making Honey-Butter Toast

1. Use thick slices of bread. To achieve the signature look and fluffy inside/crispy outside texture of honey-butter toast we recommend starting with a loaf of milk bread, brioche, or challah, or soft white bread and slicing it by hand into 2-inch thick slices. If you want the geometrical look of classic brick toast and your bread does not have square edges, feel free to trim the crusts. If choosing brioche or challah, we recommend looking for a non-braided loaf, which will be easier to slice into even pieces.
2. Make sure the layer of honey-butter is nice and thin. If it is too thick, your bread won’t crisp up properly, and the crackling exterior is key here.
3. Cook it in the oven. When we set out to test methods of cooking the toast, we thought it might be better cooked on the stovetop rather than in the oven, with the assumption that direct contact with a hot pan would lead to more even, more crisp results. But after multiple tests, we were convinced that the oven was the much better option. While it takes longer than the stovetop, the oven created a more beautiful, more even golden-brown color and a wonderfully crisp crust on the toast. Using the oven also reduces the risk of burning both the sugar and your fingers. If you don't feel like heating a large oven just for this, a quality toaster oven is a great option.
4. Let the sugar set before digging in. While you don't want to serve the honey-butter toast cold, giving it a few minutes to cool down after coming out of the oven is enough for the sugars, which are still soft when very hot, to set into a crackly glaze. After the rest time, the toast will still be slightly warm, but not hot.
5. Add a slightly tart topping to keep the sweetness in check. While you could certainly top this toast with pastry cream, chantilly cream, or whipped cream—and any of them would be delicious—we like the way slightly tart Greek-style yogurt complements the sweet toast. And rather than starting with sweetened yogurt, which can be cloying, we lightly sweeten and flavor plain yogurt with honey and vanilla bean paste. Another great option: crème fraîche in place of the yogurt.