Well, I was brought up to expect a BLT to be made with toast. I also disagree with the idea that raisin bread should never be toasted ~ I prefer it to BE toasted, and recommend spreading it with cream cheese (with or without butter first).

My pet peeve regarding toasting is when french bread is over-toasted for a po-boy sandwich, so that when you bite into it, the bread instantly fragments into tiny hard particles that one can easily inhale and choke on. The french bread we have in New Orleans is pretty unique ~ very light and "airy," with a fairly hard crust on the outside and a soft light inside consiting of more air-bubbles than actual bread. At its best, it is incomparable, and is the perfect medium for soaking up plenty of gravy when used to make a roast-beef sandwich. But it gets stale very quickly and easily (which is why our local restaurants all offer bread pudding as a featured dessert). Some of the less reliable sandwich shops try to get an extra day out of rench bread that is going stale by toasting it, and the result is brittle, dry, and nasty.

"Making toast" may be jokingly referred to as the most rudimentary level of culinary art, but it really isn't all that simple. There's a fine line between not-toasted-enough and overdone, and it varies according to the bread you're dealing with.

BWL: about those hot dog buns: I don't like 'em soggy and steamed, either. This is how I prepare dogs & buns ~ I put a flat griddle on one burner of the stove and a skillet/pan with an inch or so of water on another. The dogs go into the water to boil while I grill the buns on the other pan: first I open 'em up and butter the inner surfaces, then plop 'em butter-side-down on the hot pan, like grilled cheese sandwiches. If the timing is right, the dogs are at full boil by the time the buns are done to perfection. Buns come off the stove, dogs come out of the boiling water and go onto the hot grill to sear until they blister, and then you put each dog on a bun and add condiments to taste. (I like pickle relish and yellow mustard, sometimes sauerkraut.)

Speaking of grilled cheese sandwiches: are they a US-only delicacy? I know that toasted cheese sandwiches are popular on the other side of the pond, and they're something else entirely. Both sandwiches ideally include melted cheese, but the "toasted" alternative is drier on the outside. The "grilled" cheese sandwiches I grew up with are buttered on the outside before being grilled/fried on both sides. Yum!