Michelin French Toast at Home

French toast seems like a simple thing. I found a few techniques from a Michelin chef that really levels it up. This dish for me typifies the difference between Michelin chefs and normal chefs by taking something that's fairly simple and elevating it to the next level. This is a recipe provided to us by Helena Rose for her perfect French toast. Absolutely love this recipe, I've tried this a couple of times at home. Really good one for the weekend but basically French toast, pampadou, as my dad calls it, eggy bread. Helena Rose has a three Michelin star restaurant in the Connaught. She's one of only two women to have three Michelin stars in the UK but this is just milk and cream. Recipes will be below in the description and we're just bringing this up to the boil. What I love about this recipe is it's like just awesome little hack that she does at the end that just elevates it from any other French toast you've tried before. This is optional but what we want to do is just add in some vanilla into the milk at this stage. Open her up and then taking your knife, just scrape along down, add it into your pot and then also just add in the actual vanilla pod itself on a nice low temperature. So this is just coming up on the minimum temperature. Okay so that's nearly up to temp and what we're going to do, add in some sugar into our egg yolks and then we're just going to lightly whisk until we've got a nice pale frothy mix. Now we've got our basic sabayon at the bottom of this pan which is just egg yolks and sugar. Just take out your little vanilla pods, squeeze them against the side of the pan, really get that flavour out there. I'm just going to trickle in slowly our milk. So just do this in stages. Now it's quite a light creme anglaise or custard. Basically you don't really want it to be really nice and really thick because you want it to be super light inside the pan. So what happens now is that is tempering the eggs. When you're making a custard like this it's all kind of about patience. You really just need to do the work to let that egg yolk thicken up the sauce. Okay so just return this back to the pan, make sure you get all the vanilla from the base of that bowl and then we're just going to stand here and make sure it comes to temp without scorching on the bottom and curdling. Essentially we have been cooking or been thinking of ways to use stale bread in desserts and snacks since the Roman times and many people think that the basic dish of French toast comes from the Roman times but then also this dish is very elevated. You know like obviously it's Helen de Rose but I mean the techniques and everything it's quite you know it's quite simple, it's all quite straightforward. The egg protein is going to sort of start to set and coagulate anything above 80 degrees. So this is on at the moment 78 degrees. I'm just going to keep it going and you've got a thing it doesn't need to be a set custard because it's going to go inside the brioche soak inside and it's going to cook in a little bit of foaming butter so it's already going to thicken up in there as well and the the end result if you were to take this too far you'd get this like almost like eggy protein forming over the side of the bread which you don't want. Nice, it's just thickened up. Whenever you're talking about thickness of a sauce or the nice consistency you're looking for it to leave a trace on the back of a wooden spoon or maryse. You can see that that's not what this is that's not what this is going to do. It's much looser at this stage. Next up we're going to start thinking about our brioche. This will absolutely work with other bread that you have if you've got some leftover bread but depending on the softness of the bread and the sort of butter content and fat content you probably just want to increase the soaking time by around about a minute. So if you're using brioche we're going to do two minutes per side. If you're using a white loaf then do it for maybe two and a half to three minutes per side. If you're using a sourdough then go four minutes per side. With this brioche I'm just going to trim off the end. I'm going to leave on these crusts because they actually help support the sort of structural integrity of the bread as it cooks. Two fingers is a really nice generous sort of decadent portion. I know I've got slightly fat fingers but if you've got really weird little small fingers just do it. Just do two plus your little finger. Unless you're living alone as a bachelor and cooking yourself pamperdou on a Saturday morning you'll probably be cooking for another person. But the issue can be if you don't stagger the soaking times you'll get one really soggy one before the other one is cooked. So you just need to factor that in. Luckily though they do hold really nicely. So I'm going to put in into the base of this tray my custard and then I'm just very very slowly covering it in my custard mix. I'm then going to flip it nice and delicately and then I'm going to set a two minute timer. Two minutes one side two minute the other. Fish back bosh ready to cook. Whilst that soaks let's just heat up our pan and I'm just going to use a little bit of butter. I'm also just going to use a tiny splash of veg oil. It's been two minutes on that first side so just give it a flip. Feels almost completely saturated but it still wants to have its structural integrity. The reason I just want to start it off in melted butter is just because the milk solids in the butter will darken quite quickly so you could infer in theory you could also use clarified but I just know a lot of people don't have the time to use clarified butter in the morning when they're making french toast. So I just put a knob of butter in and start at low and then increase the speed and then the oil will just stop that butter burning straight away. Okay so our french toast has been soaking for four minutes total now. We don't want to be in a position where we are soaking them all at the same time and then waiting for them to cook. So once I put my first one into the pan then I'm going to start soaking the next. I'm going to be serving this with some mascarpone. Completely optional. I think it gives a really mouthfeel. Just a small amount of icing sugar and just a touch of salt and you don't really want to whisk it at this stage because then it will uh it could sort of split out. So yeah perfect. You could add a little bit of orange zest to this or anything really. A splash of booze but there we go. So we've got a really nice sort of foundational colour on there. So this one just went in two minutes ago so what I'm going to do I'm just going to take that out of the soaking liquid. Maybe I'll add a tiny bit more on top so it can continue to absorb some of it. Okay so really important now is just paying a good amount of attention to the bottom of this pan. The more movement it gets basically the more even that crust is going to be. You really want to make sure that you've not got too much fat in there but now this has been cooking for around about three and a half four minutes. So last side and then what we're going to do is take it out place it onto our tray before our little touch of magic at the end and keep checking it because the colour will go quite quickly. So this is where just using foaming butter really helps. Foaming butter is great for a lot of different things. I know I don't need to convince you that I like foaming butter but one thing that it does do is it will colour things really consistently. If you imagine that all that foaming butter is sort of engulfing all of the surface of that of that french toast and here we want really delicate colour. So it's working really really beautifully just to give it a really nice even crust the whole way over. And yes you could take this out a little bit sooner but it's worth it just to get this even coverage all over and this helps with the next step as well. But what's happened now is and you can feel it it starts to almost just souffle up a little bit. It's cooking inside so all the richness is going to be sort of trapped inside that brioche. It's going to be sweet, it's going to be buttery, it's just going to be absolutely next level and you can kind of tell now that that's cooked. So then what we do is we take it out and weirdly enough for a the same for the second clean out our pan and then we start with a final finesse three Michelin star Helen de Rose touch on our french toast. So this is delicious as it is now. You could run it through the oven but we are actually just going to toast it with an extra layer of golden caster sugar on top. So I want to cover most of the bases on the bread and just nicely turn out like that. The sugar is turning into caramel around the outside and importantly just leave it alone at the moment. All of that caramel to a form before we flip it over. Right okay and once our caramel all the sugar's melted it's quite important at this stage that we move it around a little bit. Still trying to get that even colour over the whole base of the pan. You think it's sort of on the way on the edge just take it off just a little bit before and you get this like ultra decadent caramelised toast and all you'd need to do now is just continue with the rest of your slices and what I've done is just covered that in a little bit of Maldon salt. I would serve this to be honest just on its own. You can also just serve it with some figs. The sugar, the richness is just cut by that flaky salt on top. So just to serve up completely optional but I like to do it anyway. I've got a bit of Hennessy. Flambe that up together. Oh look at that nice Rocher of our mascarpone. Do I have a treat for you today chef? Look at that glass-like finish. Let's dig in. So you can see the custard's almost set inside it but it's added this richness and decadence and then you've got this crisp and crunch on the outside and exterior. It's one of the things I make at home all the time just because you have like quite often stale bread but it's never actually as good as you buy I think if you use brioche. The inside is perfectly moist and juicy and sort of decadent. It's just perfect.