h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's not just students who survive on toasted sandwiches. In days of yore when i had just left home and was living in shared flats i used to eat many toasties. As Keef said you can put almost anything in a toastie. I have yet to try a choppedup Mars bar, this appeals to me!
A favourite of mine is sliced banana with grated chocolate (or choccy spread) and a sprinkling of desicated coconut. The banana can get extremely hot but it's divine. Cheese and onion is my usual one, but it has to be eaten with copious amounts of ketchup.
Happy munching! Sue Lewis

Beware when constructing a mini-pizza inside a toasted cheese sandwich. I placed tomato puree, grated cheese and sundry pieces of ham n' stuff between bits of bread and began the normal process. However when the sandwich's time was nigh the contents were quickly and painfully discharged over me due to the different rates at which the ingredients of the Toastie had cooked !

As some one who works with medics I can confirm that many household accidents and burns seen in A&E are caused by lack of care with toasted sandwiches . Particularly those containing tomato of various natures.

This has been a public service announcement on behalf of you all.

Ah, would that the Guide had been around before THEN !

I've mentioned this in another post somewhere but, if you haven't already, I urge you to try cheese and peanut butter, either in a toastie or just on toast. With ketchup.

You won't regret it.

WARNING! Ketchup is potentially dangerous in a sandwich maker, so the toastie version if this dish would probably be better without it.

The only problems i have encountered with toasted sandwiches are as follows:

1) When you bite into one end the filling invariably squirts out the other. The only way to overcom this is to ensure you have plenty of overlap with you bread and the toaster. This is not always possible with todays 'modern' breads

2) I always find that when you stick the bread in you have the diagonal line down the centre (I hope you know the bit i mean) that squashes the bread flat and i find that this squashes the filling flat to thus rendering the sandwich a bit well, boring. The only way to remedy this is to put the filling in the two corners of the bread but this leads to the 'squirting' problem (see point 1).

I would also like to state that my preferred filling is cheese and beans

You can get a nice effect by stuffing tinned spaghetti into it. It needs to be allowed to cool for a period of weeks though... But the end result is pretty darn, damned, godamn yummy... Mmm
---Barry Life---

My favourite filling is syrup. It melts into the bread, leaving a very flat, but very tasty sandwich. Another favourite habit is trimming the little bits of crust that stick out the sides. They are just warm and nice.
I have encountered two problems with toasted sandwiches.
1) if the filling is made from a slice of something ( say ham ), the first bite results in the entire slice being pulled from the sandwich and then surgical grafting itself to the chin.
2) if for some reason the mabufacturing process result in no teflon being applied to one half of the toaster( like in mine ), it then becomes impossible to lever the damn sandwich out without breaking it into several peices.

If u cover the naked bread in butter on both sides and also cover the inside of the toaster in butter, not only does it stop the toastie from breaking up, it also ends up frying ur toastie to a golden lovelyness!!

- My favourite topping would be cheese and corned beef..with pepper and its cheap as well!

Mine has to be banana with grated Cadbury's - very good if you are hormonally wacked out. (So have probably just isolated half my audience)

Chicken, asparagus spears, mozzarella cheese and cracked black pepper!

Need I say more?

What ever you do don't try to stuff to much Macaroni cheese in a toasted sandich because it tries to make a bid for freedom. I speak from experience and spent ages cleaning up the sandwich maker. you can also make a toated cheese sandwich in a frying pan:-
(-: butter one side of each slice of bread.
(-: Sprinkle herbs on the butter.
(-: place one of the butter sides down and put the cheese slices on the dry side.
(-; do exactly the same with the other slice and place the dry side on the cheese.
(-: heat it up until melted and serve.

Have you noticed it costs more for a toasted cheese sandwhich compared to an ordinary one in shops, why?

Glad to see there's finally a bit of gourmet toasting going on.

Parma Ham, Applewood smoked cheddar, fresh coriander, smoked garlic and a dash of Kikkoman soy. mmmmm... must go home and cook...

Evil Alternative

Pepperoni, stilton and extra mature cheddar, and a healthy dash of Dave's Insanity Sauce (a vicious little sauce worthy of a page of its own).

Why is everyone going on about the temperature? Just leave the dang thing in there long enough to TOAST, not BAKE, and you'll have no worries. Try 45 seconds to a minute or so.

Try: soy-based 'chicken' nuggets (w/pickle and no-salt ketchup), or canned chili, or frozen corn/peas with tomato paste and some Minute Rice (which absorbs extra moisture nicely)

I have to say that the best thing to do is to tost some bread, then spread peanut butter on the bread, slice up a banana and place it evenly on the peanut buttered breard sprinkle a little suger over the creation slap the other peanut butterd peace of bread on top and consume with delite

My favorite is jalapeno peppers (mild or extra spicy, according to taste) and roast beef. Oh, and you need lots of salt and vinegar too.

But my sandwich toaster stinks if any of the beef flavored vinegar leaks out, so I have to do them in a frying pan Is there a good way to clean toasters that isn't too much work?

Sob...please read my rejected article at http://www.h2g2.com/A37937
...as it's pretty relevant.

I used to work in a Mongolian Grill, and the best way to clean the huge chrome hot plate, was to encourage punters to try the prawns in white wine, as the superheated wine was excellent at removing all the crud from the grill!! They never did understand why a dish based on white wine, generally came out brown...

Still I would recommend you get your toaster going at full whack, slop on a bit of cheap white wine, and get it bubbling away in all those crevices. Once all the detritus has been dissolved away, give the whole thing a rub down with butter, or am I talking about my own fetishes here?

Does anyone else out there call a toasted sandwich a jaffle? I'm reading away here and beginning to think that maybe it is just me....

But anyway if you want a real challenge when preparing your jaffle (i.e. toastie/toasted sandwhich) try and egg jaffle. The trick is to make a well in your bread so that the egg does not escape when you first put it on the bread. But be careful not to poke a hole in the bread while doing this or you end up with the egg filing outside the bread before you even begin... Serve with loads of tomato sauce (aka ketchup)......enjoy..........

My God, a whole gourmet world awaits me if only I go to the loft and look for my abandoned toaster! I abandoned it because I gave up on the tasteless cotton wool that masquerades as bread in a sliced supermarket loaf. Shame though, as the egg idea was a winner. My toaster had two dished plates, and the result was poached egg on toast without all that stringy muck in a saucepan.
But when I was a student, the staple (if not the only) food of the Science Faculty was Pie, Beans and Chips. There even used to be a separate queue in the Refectory solely for P,B & C that must have resembled nothing so much as a prison chow line. Not that I speak from experience of prison food, I hasten to add...