Crispy Cheese Avocado Toast

Another easy, award-winning recipe from the snack daddy himself.

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Hey, gang. You may know me as the guy who complains about movies, television, and the sorry state of mass media, but I’ll be honest, even I get tired of my opinions sometimes. But it’s also true that I contain multitudes; I also love cooking delicious food to feed my family and/or impress my occasional house guests.

About a year and a half ago I shared my standard recipe for avocado toast, which racked up something like a million pageviews or something like that. Which in retrospect, apparently wasn’t enough to keep me from getting laid off from that publication, but seems pretty impressive for a humble toast recipe! And insofar as numbers mean anything anymore, it’s evidence that the recipe wasn’t half bad.

Anyway, that’s still my most basic recipe for easy but delicious and fancy-ish avocado toast, but today I’m sharing a fun variation on that theme. I wouldn’t say this avocado toast is better than that one, but it’s a nice little twist for when you want to switch things up a bit, or make a slightly heartier version that is closer to a lunch in its own right than a snack.

Okay!

Crispy Cheese Avocado Toast

I see a lot of people on Instagram doing taco and burrito variations with crispy cheese on the outside. Makes sense! Who doesn’t like a nice nutty, slightly gooey, grilled cheese? Here I just applied it to avocado toast.

Ingredients

1 slice of preferably nice bread, preferably from your local bakery (I used a seedy sourdough here, which worked great)
1 small or 1/2 of a large avocado
1 garlic clove
Lime wedge (lemon also works)
About a handful of white melting cheese (I used Chihuahua style melting cheese, but Jack, Mozzarella, or shredded Mexican blend in a bag all work just fine)
Butter or olive oil
Salt and pepper, maybe a little MSG too if you nasty

Equipment

Stove
Pan
Spatula
Knife
Butter knife, spreader, or spoon

Directions

First, get a pan on the stove and heat it up to about medium, medium high-ish. Next take a nice big slice of your bread and, if you’re using butter, butter one side of it. If you’re using olive oil, put a healthy glug of olive oil in your hot pan (I prefer the flavor and texture of olive oil, but olive oil is pretty expensive these days so sometimes I use butter because you don’t need as much of it so it’s a little cheaper).

Next, take your buttered (or un-buttered) bread and grill it in the pan. Get it nice and browned (but not blackened). You want the surface nice and rough. Once it’s toasted, take it out of the pan. Next, get your garlic clove and just slice off the tip like you’re some kind of garlic mohel doing a circumcision at a garlic bris.

Next take that flat side of the garlic and rub it all across the toasted side of your bread like the garlic is cheese and the bread is a cheese grater*. That’s going to infuse the bread with a surprising amount of garlic flavor even if it looks like you aren’t using much of the garlic (I stole this trick from how the Spanish make Pan Con Tomate).

Once that’s done, grab a handful of your cheese and just put it straight into the pan. It’s going to feel weird, but I swear this works:

Now, take the untoasted side of your bread and just squish it into that cheese pile that’s starting to melt.

The key here is patience. It doesn’t even really matter what kind of pan you use (as you can see above and below, I’ve done this using a cast iron and a non-stick pan, they both work fine). What you need to do is to just let the cheese cook until it’s fully browned, at which point it will release from the pan, and you’ll be able to get a spatula under it and flip it without making a mess. You can usually tell when it’s done by the lacing at the edges and by the browned smell.

You can even fold the edges up before you flip it a little to make it pretty:

Once the cheese has fully browned, remove it from the pan:

Now, the easiest way to halve and de-pit an avocado is like this:

Do not do what this lady did on the Mexican-themed episode of the Great British Bake-Off. Hopefully this is remedial information for you but one never knows.

Now, there are various ways to cut and spread an avocado (you could do a pretty fan like this) but I generally just take a butter or spreader knife (sidenote: buy yourself a spreader knife, they’re very handy) and make a cross hatch in the avocado half like this:

From there you can just scoop around the edge with your spreader knife (a spoon also works) and spread it on the grilled cheese side of the bread like chunky butter (great pet name for your mother).

Now, take your lime wedge and squirt it over your avocado layer, just a nice little sprinkle to prep it for the seasoning. Dry-wet-dry, and whatnot. Next sprinkle a healthy dusting of salt, and another dusting of pepper (I use a pretty good amount of black pepper, I think avocado and black pepper are a nice combo).

Voila! You have made crunchy-cheese avocado toast.

The browned cheese adds a nutty note to the avocado-garlic-citrus combination I love so much (in my other recipe I use Parmesan to a similar end), and the half-grilled toast gives you both the toasty crunchiness of toasted bread and the untoasted spring of fresh bread. And then you’ve got that creamy fatty texture that only fresh avocado has (I kind of hate when people cook avocado, it’s already perfect) combined with just a little melty cheese and that top-layer-of-lasagna crust on top. That’s a lot of range for a piece of toast.

It’s pretty damned great for how easy it is, if you ask me. From now on when something is easy, don’t say “It’s a piece of cake!” Switch it up and say “Ah, it’s a piece of toast!**”

*Related joke: You know what Helen Keller said after someone handed her a cheese grater? “Most violent book I ever read.”

**Don’t do that.