French toast is the highest form of brunch food. Why is it so hard to make a decent piece
of French toast? Let's go over some huge mistakes you could be making when cooking your favorite
brunch meal so that next time, you can make a delightful piece.
Like so many things in the world of cooking and baking, you've got to be careful with
your ratios. For French toast, the amount of ingredients can make all the difference
in the finished product.
Too much, says Bon Appetit, could turn your bread into a soggy mess. The same could happen
if you measure out a bit too much dairy. Oversaturated bread will likely never get that beautiful,
crispy texture on the outside of the very best French toast.
Too much sugar can simply make your French toast too sweet. Going too hard with the sugar
in the beginning could overpower your palate, especially if you plan to top the finished
dish with powdered sugar, maple syrup, or for the overachievers amongst us, some sliced
fruit.
Remember to steady your hand a bit when you're dosing out the sugar. Your teeth will thank
you.
The heart of French toast is, well, the toast. The specific kind of bread that you pick can
make or break the finished dish.
What kind of bread should you pick, then? Generally, says The Kitchn, you should pick
something pretty sturdy with a good structure that can soak up the custard. You would do
well to use breads made with enriched dough, like brioche or challah.
They have the dense crumb and overall structure that can stand up to a long soak in a bath
of custard. They're also pretty tasty on their own. Someone has to eat the ends of the loaf,
after all, and you may as well enjoy them.
Avoid weak white bread, which can quickly turn to mush. Also, turn away from rustic
loaves like focaccia, which can have such an open structure that your egg custard will
quickly leak away.
Once you've found your sturdy, fluffy bread, cut it into one-inch slices. That will allow
enough space for the custard to saturate the bread without making it so thick or soggy
that your slice won't cook through.
Wet bread is the enemy. You are a great intellect indeed if you can think of a genuinely tasty,
fulfilling application for soggy, damp bread. For the rest of us, the sight of a saturated
loaf is one of the most depressing things you can find in a kitchen.
Now, you probably are not going to be dealing with truly wet bread unless you've experienced
a real kitchen disaster. If that's happened, you poor thing, the bread will have to go
into the trash anyway.
But even slightly moist slices of the stuff can throw off your French toast game. Yes,
this may seem confusing at first, especially since you will eventually saturate it with
your custard. But, starting off with a properly dry bit of bread can help you achieve that
beautiful crispy texture that's made French toast a favorite of the breakfast menu.
Getting that dry bread is actually fairly simple, reports Cook's Illustrated. You will
have to take on another couple of steps, but take heart, as they're about as straightforward
as one could hope.
Preheat your oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Grab an oven-safe wire rack and arrange your
slices on the surface. Give the slices about eight minutes, flip them, and then wait another
eight minutes more. This relatively simple sequence could be enough to make you the favorite
of your local at-home brunch circle for a long time to come.
Don't forget about your temperatures. This seems almost insultingly obvious, but it's
shockingly easy to get over-eager and let your ingredients enter the mix either too
cold or too hot. That can make the difference between French toast that is merely okay and
French toast that could become transcendent.
Part of the temperature equation involves ingredients that are typically stored cold.
Milk and eggs generally need to be brought up to room temperature, especially if your
recipe involves melted butter. Cold ingredients can cause the melted fat to seize up and become
unworkable and downright nasty. That butter can become chunky and, even worse, grainy.
We know that life happens, though, so thankfully Wonder How To has a good solution for the
time-strapped cook. Run some warm, but not hot, tap water into a bowl. You can put your
dairy into a heat-safe container, and let it and the eggs sit in the water bath to gently
warm.
French toast isn't health food.
"That's more sugar than I've had on triple D probably ever."
Surely, you already know this and agree, or else you wouldn't be here in the first place.
There's no shame in the occasional indulgence, anyway. While you're here, you might as well
make the treat really count and use the richer stuff available to you.
It's not just a matter of treating yourself, however. Dishes like French toast really benefit
from a good hit of full-fat ingredients. Using more watery substitutes, like two-percent
milk or, if you dare to even think about it, skim milk, simply won't do.
For dairy, The Kitchn recommends using the full-bodied stuff like whole milk or half
and half. When you bite into the finished product, you'll be glad that you didn't shy
away from the dairy. The extra fat in the milk or half and half will up the creaminess
of the French toast custard, helping make the center of your slice wonderfully smooth
and delicious.
Once you've carefully selected your bread, dried the slices, and warmed up the ingredients
to room temperature, you need to consider the custard. Made up of eggs, dairy, and flavorings
like vanilla and cinnamon, it's clearly just as important as the bread.
Just make sure you're mixing it pretty well. Fully incorporating all of the ingredients
is important in any case, but especially so when it comes to French toast. If you've got
unmixed eggy bits floating around in the custard, it can dramatically change the texture, taste,
and overall eating experience.
So, break out the whisk and exercise your arm muscles. It may take a small amount of
elbow grease, to be certain, but it will be worth it for sure. Anyway, it's not as if
you're going to overwork the custard, as you might when you're making something with flour
and have to worry about overdeveloping the gluten. Here, you are welcome to mix the custard
until your arm falls off, or more advisedly, until the mixture is an even color with a
smooth texture.
Maybe at this point you're done. You just want the French toast already.
"Babe, you have some powdered sugar on your face…"
"Back off I'm starving!"
"Come on! Just let me get it off."
"Get your own French toast, Jess!"
That's completely understandable, but consider the glory of a truly perfect slice of brioche
or challah bread, filled with a custard, seasoned with a bit of vanilla, cooked until the outside
is just brown and crisp. Stay strong, and you, too, can achieve this bit of food nirvana.
Hopefully, that vision sustains you through what may at first sound like an utterly insane
tip: strain the custard. Yes, really. Slate recommends running your egg and dairy mixture
through a fine-mesh strainer to really make sure you've got all the unincorporated bits
of egg out of your mixture.
If that sounds totally bonkers, give it a try just once and decide for yourself. What
else do you have to lose, other than a couple of extra minutes? You may find that the results
really are much smoother than without the strainer.
This step may be one of the most mysterious and nerve-wracking parts of the French toast
process. You've got your bread, you've mixed and maybe even strained your custard, and
the stove or oven is preheating. Then, you're confronted with a container of your custard
mixture and a rack of ever-so-slightly dried bread. Now what?
According to Bon Appetit, most cooks chicken out a bit at this point. They quickly dip
each side of the bread into the custard and then fling it into the pan, almost as if they're
afraid of handling the mixture they've so carefully put together.
Instead, be a little braver and let your bread soak a bit longer. If you don't give the bread
some time, then how could it fully take up enough custard? Bon Appetit actually recommends
giving it a good 15 to 20 minutes for the full experience. If you've selected the right
kind of bread with a sturdy, relatively dense crumb, then it should be able to stand up
to that time beautifully.
Imagine that the pan is too cold when you throw in your first carefully soaked slice.
In that case, says Bon Appetit, the custard may start to leak out of the bread and form
a "foot" of eggy goop. This means you're losing custard from the center of the slice, potentially
leaving the middle sadly unflavored and lacking body. It also looks a little weird, if you
care to fuss over details like that.
If the pan is good and hot by the time you're ready to start cooking, the custard sets on
the surface of the bread right away. Then, you won't have to stand and watch despairingly
as a significant amount of flavor seeps out and is cooked to death before you can even
taste it.
As much as you want to make sure your pan is hot and ready to go, be careful when you're
reaching out toward the controls on your stove. Going too heavy on the heat could also turn
your French toast into a burnt, smoky mess. Too cold, and you could produce a slice with
an unsightly "foot" of custard at the bottom and a sad lack of the same custard in the
middle of your bread.
Imagine the perfect piece of French toast. It's cooked golden brown on each side, not
too soggy, and not so crispy that it will get carbonized or cut up the inside of your
mouth. To get that, according to The Kitchn, you need to get your pan or griddle up to
a medium-low heat.
Yes, that does mean you may be cooking for a little longer than you would like, but the
slices genuinely need the right amount of time to get the center cooked and the outside
that lovely golden color.
Butter's got a great flavor. There's no use denying it, even if mass quantities of butter
aren't the best thing for you on a regular basis. If you're going to cook with it, however,
take a few minutes to really understand the structure of butter and how it reacts to heat.
That can make all the difference when it comes time to cook your French toast.
According to Discover, butter is a mixture of complex molecules known as triglycerides.
These form lipids, or water-repelling components that make up the fatty element of butter.
When the lipids and water are finely blended together into an emulsion, you essentially
get butter. This means that, when you use butter in a pan or otherwise, you're dealing
with water and more solid lipids, which are essentially the fats that give butter its
flavor.
Those butter solids can burn if you're not careful, so that's where oil comes in. As
per Bon Appetit, coating your pan with a bit of butter and neutral oil together will help
prevent burnt butter, which can taste pretty off and could dramatically change the flavor
of your French toast.
Burnt butter can also mean there are little carbonized bits that will stick to every slice
after the first one comes out. This simple step can make your hard work in the kitchen
as visually perfect as it is delicious.
If you're just making French toast for yourself or your immediate family, there's nothing
wrong with using a pan. Perhaps you also own a griddle of some sort, which, assuming you've
got good control over the heat, is another perfectly good alternative.
However, groups present a problem. If you've got a whole horde of people coming over for
brunch or sleepily wandering in after, say, a long night of holiday reunions and meals,
pans become a hurdle. Do you really want to be stuck cooking and growing more and more
bitter as everyone else is enjoying French toast while you're still cooking?
To stave off the resentment, consider relocating to the oven. Epicurious advocates for baked
French toast, which could be the cure to a big group problem. If you're especially curious
and have some extra time, you may want to experiment with this method to see if you
can get the result to your satisfaction. All the better to show off in front of a crowd,
too.
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