Avocado Toast with Chilli Crisp and Lime

It is easy to be cynical about avocado toast, and then somebody makes you a good one and you remember there is a reason it took over. The good version and the bad version use the same three ingredients; what separates them is texture management.

The toast has to be armour

Avocado is roughly seventy per cent water. Put it on lightly toasted bread and within ninety seconds you have a damp, structureless thing that folds when you pick it up. Toasted dark and then brushed with oil, the surface is dry, rigid, and briefly hydrophobic, and it holds.

Sourdough or any bread with an open, chewy crumb. Sliced sandwich bread will not survive this no matter how you toast it.

Crushed, with lumps

Six strokes with a fork. Every additional one turns more of it to purée, and purée on toast is a spread rather than a topping — there is nothing left to bite through. Lumps also hold the lime juice and salt in pockets rather than distributing them into anonymity.

Acid, more than you would use

A whole half lime for two avocados. Avocado is very fatty and quite bland, and without real acidity it reads as rich and flat within three mouthfuls. The lime is doing the same job the lemon does in the bean stew: making the fat legible.

Chilli crisp, from the bottom of the jar

The oil at the top is the least interesting part. What you want is the sediment — fried garlic, shallot, chilli flake, sometimes fermented soy bean — because that is where both the crunch and the savour are. Push the spoon to the bottom.