How To Make Radish Toast

I know avocado toast isn't going anywhere for a while, despite some people's pleas for it to go the way of the molten chocolate cake. What started as a flash-in-the-pan trend has proven that it's here to stay—heck, half the Tasting Table office eats it for breakfast.

And I get it. There's something soothing and satisfying about scooping the soft green flesh out of the skin and slathering it on a slice of bread. And since avocados have a mild flavor on their own, it's basically a conduit for whatever you want to put on top, from fancy oils to poached eggs to pickled vegetables.

Well, avocado toast, you can't sit with us. Lately, another toast has been beckoning on Instagram and Twitter, its gorgeous colors peacocking like Regina George in her Lexus. That would be radish toast, spread thick with butter and layered with paper-thin slices of the peppery vegetable like rows of fuchsia-rimmed sequins.

It's no wonder radish toast is suddenly everywhere, right this very minute: "People are craving spring. Radishes are like cucumbers but with more pungency and punch," Raquel Pelzel, former TT editor, food writer and author of the upcoming cookbook Toast from Phaidon (to be released this fall), says. "The pink is so pretty; the slices look like flower petals."

And not only are they nice to look at, radish toasts are, to make this entire piece about Mean Girls, the cool-without-even-trying Cady Heron to avocado's bland, dopey Karen Smith. They've got texture. They've got radish's natural bite. And they've got BUTTER. Um, case closed.

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Plus, they couldn't be easier to make. If you want to be all OCD and get that pretty tiled effect, shave whole radishes on a mandolin (or, you know, slice them however you please). Spread a good amount of unsalted butter (the radish's traditional BFF, its creamy roundness balancing out the vegetable's bite) on a thick slice of toast. Then layer the radish slices across and top it all with coarsely ground sea salt and some healthy cracks of black pepper for even more crackly texture. Crunch through, then go back for more.

Of course, you could get fancy with the toast, too: Experiment with beautiful watermelon or breakfast radishes. Pelzel recommends roasting or pickling the radishes for a completely different flavor experience. 

For now, we're happy with ours raw and buttery. You could even say we're tickled pink—which we only wear on Wednesdays, of course.