Avocado Toast with Poached Egg and Smoked Salmon

Start with the eggs, because age matters more than brand. An egg a week old poaches cleaner than one laid yesterday — as an egg sits, its white loosens and thins, and thin white is exactly what scatters into feathers in the pan. A fresh egg from a box with yesterday's date, oddly, behaves worse here than one that's been in your fridge five or six days. If you only have very fresh eggs, strain the loose watery white off into a sieve before you crack them into the water — you lose a bit of volume but you gain a tight shape.

The vinegar: any clear vinegar with real acidity does the same job — cider vinegar, white wine vinegar, even a squeeze more lemon juice in a pinch. What you're after is pH, not flavour, since a tablespoon in a full pan of water barely registers on the tongue. Skip malt vinegar though — it's heavier and will leave a shadow of its own taste and colour in the white.

Avocado: ripe means it gives gently under a thumb at the stalk end, not that it's soft all over — soft all over usually means bruised or turning, and you'll taste a bitterness at the edges. If your avocados are still hard, there's no shortcut that doesn't compromise the texture; a few days in a paper bag with a banana is the honest fix, not a microwave. Lemon zest goes in twice on purpose — once worked into the mash where it flavours quietly, once scattered on top raw where you actually smell it as you lift the toast to your mouth. That's the whole reason behind splitting an ingredient between "inside" and "on top" in any dish: cooked-in and raw-on-top are two different flavours from one plant.

Bread: this wants a slice sturdy enough to hold weight without going soft under the avocado — a dense white or a seeded sourdough rather than a soft supermarket sandwich loaf, which will go damp the second butter and avocado meet it. Butter the toast while it's hot, not after it cools, because hot bread takes butter into itself rather than leaving it sitting as a slick on top — that's the difference between toast that tastes buttered and toast that's merely wet.

Smoked salmon wants to go on last and barely warmed by the egg's own heat, never anywhere near the pan — cooking it even slightly turns the texture chalky and kills the cure flavour you paid for. If you're doing without it, a few anchovy fillets or just extra flaky salt will give you the savoury hit that the salmon is really there for; this dish works as well without fish as a well-dressed salad works without its star vegetable, which is to say — it changes, it doesn't collapse.

Hemp seeds, chilli flakes and chives at the end are seasoning by texture as much as taste: the seeds for a bit of bite against all that softness, the chilli for a flash of heat, the chives for green freshness that cuts through the fat of avocado, butter and salmon together. None of them are structural — swap hemp seeds for toasted sesame or pumpkin seeds and nothing is lost, because their job is crunch, and plenty of things crunch.

A word on patience, since this looks like a five-minute breakfast and isn't quite: the eggs poach one at a time if you're not confident, which means the first toast sits waiting while the fourth egg cooks. Make your avocado mash and toast the bread before you touch the eggs, so when each one comes out of the water it's going straight onto a plate that's ready, not making the egg wait on you. Four eggs, four toasts, four people — this isn't a dish that scales well beyond a small table anyway, since poaching six or eight eggs in sequence while the early ones go cold defeats the entire point of the exercise.