Toast in Japan is taken seriously. If you order the “breakfast set” at a restaurant in Japan, you will probably be confronted with one of the thickest slices of toasted bread you’ve ever seen. If you manage to peer over it, you might spot a boiled egg and a small, sad amount of salad cowering there.

At the supermarket, some popular toast spreads which come in a squeezy tube are chocolate, cinnamon, melon and “french toast” flavour, but for many people, toast means butter, and the more butter, the better. For butter-lovers, the new Easy Butter Butter-Former will transform hard butter straight from the fridge into soft and cotton-like butter threads, ready and easy to be used. Sound too greasy to be true? It probably is.

One, two, three, butter threads!

One, two, three, butter threads!

This gadget is made up of four parts. You put the butter inside the 17.5cm-tall “twister”, which goes inside the cylinder, and push it up with the “pusher”, turning clockwise. There’s a cover that fits on top to protect the precious, delicate threads of buttery goodness once you’ve created them. Then you can use a knife to spread them on your toast… or just aim them straight for your mouth.

I was born and raised on margarine, but I fell for a butter lover. They do say opposites attract. Anyway, with the horrible words “trans fat” ringing in my ears, for the last few months of co-habitation I’ve been struggling to chop and mash unwieldy blocks of butter into my toast, usually ending up with more butter than bread. Some would say this is ideal, but I can’t help feeling that there must be a better way, and maybe, just maybe, this could be it.

Turning butter into threads gives it a whole lot more surface area, which in turn spreads the flavour out over your whole palate: more bang for your butter. Also, because you extract more taste and flavour out of a smaller amount which is easily controlled, you can avoid using a ridiculous amount by accident.

The Easy Butter can be used for chocolate or cheese too, sprinkling the stuff onto bread, ice cream, or pasta. Get creative with Jackson Pollock-style cuisine.

With the cover on, you can conveniently store your saturated fat of choice in the fridge, and shave more threads from the block without even getting your hands greasy.

Finally, for inspiration we have some more Japanese toast:

Strawberry toast tower from Okinawa... mmmm.

Strawberry toast tower from Okinawa… mmmm.

Not a windowless building, this is actually honey toast.

Not a windowless building, this is actually honey toast.

Mmm… I can feel my arteries hardening just looking at this delicious, fatty goodness.

Source: R25 (Japanese)