What's the Best Bread for French Toast?

In France, by the way, no, it's not called, it's not called Le French Toast. It's called Pain Perdue, named after Gérard Depardieu. No, named, it's called Pain Perdue, which means forgotten bread, because, because you eat it and you say, forget about it. Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm going to make some French toast. So we're going to start with butter, just a bit in a pan. The butter, you know, the butter element, it's, it's, well, I'm not going to say it's not important because it is, you know, a lot of the reason why if you, if you go to like your favorite diner and you get real good pancakes or you get real good French toast and it has this nice crispy edges that kind of get like that almost like toffee like caramelization that comes from frying them in a good amount of butter. Oftentimes it's going to be clarified butter. In the case of French toast, I don't, I don't, I'm not going to bother clarifying my butter because I'm not going to be cooking it too hot. You know, when you clarify your butter, the reason you do that is because there's milk solids and sugars and butter that are going to darken and burn if you try and fry in it. But for things like French toast where actually I want a little bit of that kind of brown butter flavor in there, I don't mind not clarifying my butter. All right. So as that butter melts, I'm going to start making my batter. Actually, you know what I'm going to do first is I'm going to cut some bread. So I thought we'd do a little bit of an experiment today. I've got a, I've got a loaf of shokupan. That's Japanese milk bread that I got from Uwajimaya yesterday. And what I did was I cut some slices off yesterday. One of the slices, well those slices I left sitting out so that they get stale, right? And so left sitting out, uncovered, staled overnight. Another slice I just put into the toaster this morning. So I kept it at very low toaster, about 225 degrees until it was completely dry. The third one I'm going to leave completely fresh. You know, the idea here is I want to kind of figure out, you know, people tell you to make French toast out of stale bread or bread that's been left out overnight. There's a difference between staling and drying when it comes to bread. You know, staling is the act of, staling is when your starch retrogrades. So you have these, you have this gluten and you have the starch in here. And when the starch is moist, when it combines with water, and when you heat it up, it softens and the sort of crystal structure of it breaks down. But then as it cools again, it undergoes what's called retrogradation. So it recrystallizes, it forms a more rigid structure again. And that recrystallization of starch, that's what staling is. And so staling will happen anytime you leave bread sort of sitting out. It'll also happen sort of faster in the fridge than it does on the countertop. But it's a little bit different from drying. Often it goes hand in hand with drying. So drying, the starch doesn't actually retrograde. The starch is still nice and soft in here. So when I bite into this slice of dry toast, it should still taste nice and soft and tender. It'll just taste drier like a cracker. And then finally, fresh bread, obviously there's no drying and no starch retrogradation. So kind of soft and squishy. So I do want to see sort of which one of these produces the best French toast. You know, in all the years I've been developing recipes, I've never developed my own personal recipe for French toast. However, I've very closely worked with a couple of people who have. The first one was my old roommate and my good friend, Yvonne Ruperty, who was a cook at Cook's Illustrated Magazine now. She lived in Singapore for a while and now she just moved to Napa and is teaching at the Culinary Institute of America there, teaching baking. But she and I lived together when she developed a French toast recipe for Cook's Illustrated. And then my good friend, Daniel Gritzer, who took over my old job at Serious Eats as a culinary director there. He and I worked on a French toast recipe. I think it was one of the very first recipes he did for Serious Eats. So the French toast recipe I'm using is sort of a hybrid between the two, but a little bit with a couple of twists of my own that I've been doing over the years. So I use buttermilk instead of regular milk. You can use regular milk, 2%, whole milk works, or buttermilk, even heavy cream will work. The results are obviously going to be a little bit different depending on what you do. I think Daniel's recipe calls for whole milk. I'm doing a cup of buttermilk here. His recipe calls for a cup of whole milk. If you do cream, it comes out just a little bit sort of richer, obviously. It can also kind of get a sort of almost kind of waxy texture to it, I find. Like it kind of coats your mouth in the kind of greasy way. A couple of tablespoons of sugar in here. I'm using Yvonne's. Advice doing brown sugar for a little bit more of that sort of deeper caramelized flavor. I'm going to do about a half teaspoon of pure vanilla extract. I like to go heavy on the vanilla because my kids love vanilla. And then what else am I doing? A little bit of this deuce powder, pucca deuce, sweet, sweet powder. This is, I got, I bought this from World Spice down in Pike Place. It's a, it's a combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, warm spices. What is it near exactly? Cinnamon, ginger, allspice. Okay, there we go. So if you don't want to, if you don't want to buy special powder from a special spice shop, you can just do some cinnamon, some allspice, some nutmeg or nothing at all. For a cup of liquid, we're going three eggs. Oh, you see that? I just did that thing where, which I'm not supposed to do anymore. I've learned through one of my last videos that it's better to crack the eggs on the side of the bowl because they're less likely to get eggs everywhere. They crack more easily. And then I still, just out of habit, use the counter. Yeah, they do come out a lot better when you use the edge of the bowl. All right. You know, depending on where, what country you are, the French toast is going to be made a little bit differently. It might have a different name. So, you know, in the UK they call it eggy bread and typically you would not put sugar in it. It would just be a, your custard would just be milk and eggs. And I think that's the name that makes the most sense because it is just eggy bread. In the US we call it French toast. In France they just call it, toast or Le French toast because of the, because of the metric system. All right. Some of that butter, a couple of tablespoons of it are going to go straight into my custard mixture for richness. Okay. Now I'm going to get my egg dipper bowl. I like to have a bowl like this. You know, if you don't have a bowl, if you don't have a bowl like this, which is kind of wide enough that you can fit a, you know, fit a slice of bread in it. It has these kind of lower sides. You can do it in like a, in a, in a baking dish that works pretty well. All right. So let's start with our, this is our stale bread. I'm going to let it soak a little bit. I like to let my bread kind of, you know, absorb a good amount of the custard. Cause I, I think a French toast almost is like a, you know, single serving, seared bread pudding, you know, where the custard element, you know, I like to have a sort of nice really tender custardy interior. I'm going to let this soak about that much. Now this one is going to be the dried bread. So this one, yeah, in a 225 degree oven, it was in there for about 20 minutes until it feels nice and dry. I can always see like when I, on this bread, when I, when I push it down, I can see a little bubbles popping up, which to me indicates that there's more custard actually being soaked into there. We'll see how it fries up. Can we fit a third? I don't think we can fit a third in this pan. Normally I would do this on a, on a griddle, you know, like a, a flat top on my actual burner. All right. So for the second side, I'm going to follow, this is also a technique that Daniel Gritzer has where you take just a little bit of sugar. I'm using just white sugar and you sprinkle it over the top. And again, like I know there's going to be people who like ball cut this and be like, you're eating breakfast for dessert. You Americans, you eat breakfast for dessert. And I don't have anything to say about that. Maybe you're right. I'm going to, I'm going to say, have you ever, have you ever experienced the wonders of, of a real maple syrup? Because we're going to make this even sweeter at the end. Making, making French toast for a crowd, by the way. It's, it's not one of my favorite things to do. Like, you know, there's, honestly, I think the best way to do it is if you get, if you have like a nice flat top, like a, a, I use a baking steel griddle that fits over a couple of burners and then you can do like six slices at a time or eight slices at a time, depending on the type of bread you use. So if you have a flat top, that's the best way to use it, the best way to do it. Otherwise you kind of got to do it in batches like this and do what I'm going to do, which is put it on, put it on a rack. I have a 225 degree. Actually, I think I have 180 degree oven over there where I'm going to be transferring this stuff to and holding it while I make my, while I make my next batch. So the idea, by the way, the idea behind that sugar on top is that when we, let's check this, check for, check for browning here. Let me take another second. But when we flip it over that sugar should form a sort of caramelized, shell on the top. Almost the way like, you know, like a creme brulee has a little bit of a, you know, has a caramel crust on it. So, so you get a little bit of extra texture. You get a little bit of a extra sort of bitterness to counteract that extra sweetness that you're adding. I think it comes out real good that way. In France, by the way, no, it's not called, it's not called Le French Toast. It's not just called toast. It's called Pain Perdue, which means, named after Gerard Depardieu. No, named, it's called Pain Perdue, which means a forgotten bread. Because, because you eat it and you say, forget about it. No, because it's made with a bread that you've forgotten, you know, that, that it's made with, it's what you do with stale bread. So you see, you know, there's a lot of butter in here. And the thing about using a lot of butter in a pan, like you can use a lot of butter in your, in your pan and still not end up with a lot of butter in your food. You know, it's, so when you, when you're counting, like, you know, if you're the type who likes to count calories and see, you know, get, get your macro levels or what, I don't know, whatever people do who, I don't know what people do count, who count those things. I don't even know what a macro level is. But if you're the type of person who likes to count those things, you don't count the total amount of butter that you use in the recipe or that you see in the ingredient list, because because not all of that is going to get a lot of it ends up sitting in the pan, which I say right now, but as you watch it probably is all going to get absorbed into that French toast. And whatever butter does get left over in the pan, if you want to make up for it, you can always put like a pat of butter on the toast at the end. All right. We'll let that second side go. I'm doing this big cast iron pan. This is a, I think it's a vintage Wagner or it's a Wagner or Griswold or, or some kind of no name pan that I picked up. I don't know, probably some place that sold racist civil war memorabilia, like a lot of those antique shops. There you go. Little caramelized crust action. I'm pretty sure there was racist civil war memorabilia at this shop. I went through pretty sure there was, it was, it was one of those places that looked like in the back room, you know, there was like probably like old, German world war two stuff in a hidden room in the back. Like in that scene in falling down, you know, but they had nice pants, nice pants, not nice. Maybe they had nice pants too. I don't know what's going on today. All right. Let's, um, let's get our last slice of toast in there. While the second one finishes, uh, if we do our timing right, like by the time this one's done soaking, that one should be ready to come out. Right. I guess that's assuming that fresh bread and stale bread and dry bread all take about the same amount of time to soak or assuming that I let them all soak up the same amount of time, which is a bold assumption to make. This is very scientific. All right, let's see what, see where you are at. Looking good. All right. So dry, stale. These guys are going to go into my warm oven over there. Is that, is that, are those comments going to get me demonetized? All right, let's do our last a little bit of sugar on the top. My other good friend, uh, Lan Lam, who is, um, uh, senior editor at Cooks Illustrated now, um, she has this recipe, uh, for making French toast in the oven. If you want to make it for a crowd, um, it calls for like, you melt a whole bunch of butter, you make, you make, you melt butter in a tray and you, or maybe you spray a nonstick, a nonstick spray into a pan, into a tray. Uh, and then you pour your batter, you know, your, your custard base directly into there. Uh, and then you put your slices of bread on it and they kind of absorb all of it and you bake it. Um, and I guess the aluminum on the bottom of the sheet tray transfers heat fast enough that you get some browning and then you can flip it over and brown the other side. Um, I've tried the technique. It comes out, it's, it's a good way to make a French toast for like eight people in a pretty simple way. You know, it takes some time. It takes probably like half an hour. Although that said, like if you're going to be doing French toast like this and I'm baking it, you know, cooking it a slice or two at a time is probably going to take half an hour anyway, uh, to make eight slices. Um, but you know, it comes out a little different from, from pan French toast, you know, like with pan French toast. I really like how, um, the edges get a little bit dark and a little bit burnt. It's almost like pizza for me where I want that contrast between a few little burnt spots, you know, like few really darkly charred, um, caramelized, uh, almost, almost burnt spots, you know, where you get, where you get some of that bitterness. Um, or some people would say definitely burnt. Um, I, you know, I call it artfully charred. Um, some people would call it burnt, but I like a little bit of that, that, you know, that blackness, um, to enter, uh, my French toast. See, like this bit, those little bits right there. Oh, I'm going to make a terrible joke. There's only three of us in this room right now and we definitely do not each need two slices of French toast. Ooh, this one's feeling nice and soft. Of course, um, you know, your bread choice is also going to make a, make a big difference. Um, in the, in the testing that, uh, that Daniel and I did at, at Serious Eats, um, we tried not just, um, not just regular sliced sandwich bread. We tried other types of bread as well. Um, and what we found is that especially for like American style sliced sandwich bread, you know, if you go and you get like a, a loaf of like Arnold or Oro Wheat or whatever the brand is where you live, Wonder Bread style stuff, you know, um, that, that white supermarket sandwich bread, you really do need to either dry it or stale it overnight. You need to do something to it because if you do it, if you keep it fresh, um, it almost falls apart. Like it turns into like a real, real sloppy mess. Um, beyond custard, it turns, it turns almost soupy. Um, something like a, like a real shokupan, like a Japanese style milk bread. Um, you can get away with, uh, with doing it like this. Um, and we'll see, I'll cut them up and I'll show you. You can get away with it. Um, with using fresh bread. Uh, you might prefer the texture of dried bread or stale bread, but you can get away with fresh bread. Um, something like a, you know, like a loaf of sourdough or like a real hearty homemade loaf. Um, you are going to actually want to probably not dry it out too much, uh, and keep it nice and fresh because, um, those types of bread, once they get too dry, they, they don't absorb the custard very well and they actually end up kind of remaining a little bit too tough. All right. So we got stale, dry and fresh. I'm going to put some maple syrup on them. I'm going to piss off the people from the we want plates subreddit. You know what? Let me cut into them first so that we can see, uh, what the texture inside looks like before I add some syrup to them. I'm going to cut them into triangles because triangles taste better. That's a dry, stale, dry and fresh. All right. So our stale bread here is our dry bread here and our fresh bread here. I don't know how much of a difference you can see visually. Let me try taking a bite out of them. I'll tell you. So stale. Oh, this should be a blind taste test. So I'll close my eyes. That's good. French toast. They're pretty comparable. Actually the stale and the dry, um, to the point that I would say, I don't think it really matters if you, um, well let's, let's compare it. Ooh, that one's real different. I can already tell because he kind of jiggles. Well, Hmm. Hmm. I don't know. I think I kind of like the fresh one. The fresh one really has like a nice custardy, like real, um, almost creamy, uh, yeah. Creamy custardy quality to it. Like a real good bread pudding. Whereas these ones have a lot more, um, structure to them. Um, I think what we might have to do now is, is, uh, let's, let's, let's stack them all together and then take a bite of all of them together and see what happens. Their powers combined. Does Captain Planet, you think Captain Planet uses the metric system? What is Captain Planet doing with his left hand? All right. I don't know what's going on today. All right, let's put on, let's add some maple syrup and see what happens here. Captain Planet probably likes maple syrup. Earth, wind, fire, heart, maple. That's kind of, sorry if the camera's shaking. Michael, Michael is, uh, Michael's breaking down here. All right. Um, I don't really know what I'm testing with this other than like testing, whether I can fit it all in my mouth, which I can. All right. That's some real good maple. That's some real good French toast. Um, the little experiment we did today was whether it's better to stale your bread, that is, leave it out overnight, dry it in the oven, which I put it in a 200 degree oven or 225 degree oven for about 20 minutes or so. Um, or just cook it fresh. Um, at least with this style of bread, this really nice shokupan, like a nice sort of soft, soft, but structurally, uh, structurally, uh, what is it? Um, what's the word I'm looking for? Structurally dense. No, like it's got good structure. It's got good bones. Um, structurally sufficient. Yeah. You know, it's soft, but with good bones, um, bread like this, uh, as opposed to like something like wonder bread. Um, I actually prefer, I actually prefer the custardy texture of fresh, but honestly, you know, um, you make your French toast the way you like it. I don't really know that you need me to tell you any of this stuff, but, um, but I had fun doing it. Um, the recipe, the recipe I have here, um, I'm actually going to print out, uh, the, the tweaks that I've made, uh, to the recipes of my two friends, Yvonne and Daniel. Um, if you follow the links below, um, you'll you'll find a little bit more explanation about how I make this French toast, how I like to make my French toast, um, as well as a fully, uh, written recipe. Um, and I'll also leave links to both Yvonne's recipe over at Cooks Illustrated and my friend Daniel Gritzer's recipe, uh, at Serious Heats. If you want to see all three sort of variations, um, and the different ways, uh, that the three of us like to make them. Um, all right, guys, gals, oh wait, Chen, you want some French toast? Yeah. I know you like, uh, he likes the French kiss. Chen's into that tongue action. All right, here you go, bud. Good boy. I don't know that you need lunch today, but all right, buddy. All right. So guys, gals, non-binary pals. Uh, I had fun making this French toast. I think a little bit too much fun. Um, uh, guys, gals, non-binary pals and, um, and four-legged friends. Um, we will see you next time. Bye-bye.