Classic Minnesota Peanut Butter Toast

While not profound or complicated, this simple dish, if one can call it that, is a family favorite. As with most food, quality ingredients improve the end product. Even with generic, non-local fare, even a young child will easily make and enjoy the final result.

1. Local bread, preferably with pronounceable ingredients. Shown here is Duluth's Positively 3rd Street Bakery's Uncle Paul's Bread. This bread great for toast and is substantive.

2. Local raw honey (unless your a jam person). Three advantages of raw honey. First, it has some native allergy reducing effects. Second, it generally hardens making it far easier to spread evenly and less messy. Third, it supports your local honey producer.

3. Natural peanut butter. This may have gotten a bad rap because of personal experiences with grandparents that had jars of peanut butter where the oil separated and your tongue got stuck to the roof of your mouth. You'll find great peanut butter in the refrigerated section of your grocery. Ingredients: peanuts and sea salt. Mmmmm

This is a personal preference, but lightly browned makes toast crispy on the outside but slightly chewy inside. Any darker and you have bad tasting ash crackers and any lighter and you may as well skip toasting. For this bread, you'd want to be slightly higher than medium setting, but it varies greatly with the toaster.

For years I made toast in the wrong order. What do I mean? With liquid honey, putting it on top of the peanut butter makes for a leveling miracle or you end up with honeyed fingers. With raw honey, putting the honey on top is impossible as peanut butter ends up everywhere. Order matters.
Regardless of traditional or raw honey, putting honey on first slowly melts raw honey and allows both types to slightly soak into the toasted bread...mess free honey. Yum.

Refrigerated peanut butter is quite difficult spread when cool. Trick #2 is to place a dollop of peanut butter on warm toasted bread. let it sit for about a minute, then start spreading. If you spread the peanut butter right away you're likely to mangle the bread. If you're thinking ahead, you could even set the peanut butter out 15 minutes before making your toast, which would achieve the same effect.

Spread the slightly warmed peanut butter evenly.

Now it is time to sit down and enjoy your peanut butter perfection.