How To Make Easy French Toast Recipe In 15 Min

How To Make Easy French Toast Recipe In 15 Min. If you’ve ever had crispy crunch French toast at, like, a restaurant, they probably put some kind of crumb coating on it, or they deep fried it — or both. I did not deep fry these but I did do a crumb coating and they are crispy AF, and yet not at all greasy inside. You can make French toast with any bread, but I’m not alone in thinking that brioche or challah are the best options.

Both styles of bread have egg, and the egg keeps the bread from just dissolving and going mushy when soaked in custard. Traditionally, French toast is made with day-old bread, and you could just leave these slices out overnight to stale. But according to my experiments, it works just as well to toast the bread with really low heat. It isn’t the staling per se that improves French toast, it’s the drying.

Tips for Best French Toast Recipe

I need to heat my oven for this recipe anyway so I’ve just put my bread straight onto the bars and now I’ll turn the heat on something moderate, 350ºF/180ºC, something like that. I might flip them after a few minutes. I’m not looking to brown these. I just want them dry, and they’ll dry some more as they cool and steam off for a few minutes.

You can fry French toast in any fat, including butter, but in my experiments, it comes out better with clarified butter. I’ve got a stick, 113g, in a little pot. Should be enough to fry six pieces. Just turn the heat on low and let it sit for about 10 minutes. It’ll melt, then boil off most of its water, then it’ll start fizzing and the milk solids will kinda curdle and eventually start turning golden.

Easy French toast recipe

You can strain it through a paper towel to make it extra squeaky clean, but most of the milk solids will just get caught in a sieve. You can, of course, buy clarified butter, or ghee from an Indian grocery. But we’ll use all of that for this breakfast. Clarified butter by the way gets a more even and lighter golden crust than whole butter would. The milk solids tend to overcook.

I think you’ll need at most one egg for every two pieces. I usually use half that. It depends on how custardy you like your French toast. And if you’re going for a sweet breakfast vibe, you could throw in a teaspoon of sugar per egg, maybe a splash of vanilla, and a little pinch of salt, mostly to help the egg thin out. However, if I was using unsalted butter, I’d use two pinches.

Creamy Custard Baked French Toast Recipe

Now a roughly equal quantity of milk or cream. I did a side-by-side test, and the cream does taste a lot better, surprise surprise, so I’m doing cream. You got stirred this smooth. If the egg is still all thick, like that, it’ll have a lot of trouble absorbing into the bread. Bash it with a fork or a whisk until this custard is nice and smooth.

I’ll grab another plate and pour on my crumb coating. Cornflake crumbs would be traditional and they have a nice flavor, but no substance on earth is as crispy as panko. One thing I like to do is grind the panko down with my hands a little bit. I don’t want a super-coarse crumb stabbing me in the mouth. Yes, panko is still crispier than other breadcrumbs even if you grind it down a little.

Baked French Toast Recipe Tips

Alrighty, here’s my dried and cooled bread and my clarified butter. We’re ready. And everything up to this point you could do the night before breakfast. You can cook this in any pan, but if you use a nonstick you can get away with only a thin film of clarified butter. Minimizing that fat is good when we’re frying something as absorbent as dried bread.

By the way, don’t try to put cinnamon or other spices in the breadcrumbs. They’re liable to burn in there. The cinnamon will be somewhat protected underneath the crumbs. I’d mop up the butter with the toast a little bit, just to make sure you’ve got a nice even layer of fat down there to fry the surface. You want a nice gentle sizzle. This is like medium-low on my stove.

First Side: Quick and Careful

The first side should only need a couple of minutes. And when it’s time to flip, you might be tempted to use tongs, but they tend to crush the bread irreparably at this stage, so I use a spatula even though it’s kinda awkward. Again, I’d move things around just to mop up some of that butter. If you don’t, the bottom tends to brown unevenly.

And I often find I need to reduce my heat slightly at this stage. The browning can get out of hand fast. That one’s a little too dark, and that one’s a little too light. Once you’ve got the outside somewhat crispy and firm, you can start flipping frequently, which is good because then there are no surprises. I can give that one the heat that it needs, and this one, I think, is done.

Perfecting Custard Soaking

When you’ve just done a quick dip in the custard, the toast is done when the outside looks done. You don’t have to worry about the inside. Let it drain and cool on a rack and it’ll stay crispy for a long time. Another bonus of using a thin film of butter or oil is that I can just wipe this out with a paper towel now. I’ma start fresh with a new film of clarified butter.

This batch I’ll do more the way I like it, which is to let the bread soak up some custard. How long it will take will depend on the bread and how dry you got it. But I let these soak a couple of good minutes, to the point where I could feel the bread going soft again near its core. It’s still a little firm. It’s not soaked through. And if you’ve soaked your bread through, you’ve gotta worry bout cooking the inside, not just the outside.

Crispy French Toast Technique

There’s a real risk the outside will be burned by the time the inside custard is set. So either you can take your heat way down low and just cook these very slowly in the pan, or you can do what is my preference, which is to quickly brown the outside, just as we did before, a couple minutes on each side. Look, you can see that piece puffing up — that’s the extra moisture on the inside steaming up.

It still feels a little squishy and raw on the inside. So I will remove these to the rack and I will finish cooking them in my moderately hot oven. You can just throw the rack in there if it’s heat-safe — the earlier batch, too. With the panko crumb on it, you can make a ton of French toast in advance and then crisp it back up in the oven right before everybody eats. If anything it’ll be even crispier.

Perfect Whipped Cream and Final Touches

So now I’ve got five or ten minutes where I can clean up and maybe whip some cream. we already have the cream for the custard. Just whip it on low speed for a couple of minutes until it starts to thicken up. Then you can boost the power without it splashing. The trick with whipped cream is to stop whipping right before it goes from being smooth and silky like that to being kinda rough and cheesy.

I put in a handful of sugar and a little drop or two of vanilla. Mix that up, done. So, you know these are crispy again if you open the oven and you can see the crust bubbling just a little bit. That’s absorbed butter re-frying the surface. I think I had those in there for seven minutes which is plenty to get the custard cooked through in the wetter batch. A little cream on top. Some berries would be berry nice. I caved and I got real maple syrup.

Crispy Quick Dip French Toast

You can pour it on because this is gonna be crispy pretty much no matter what you do. This is the one we just quick-dipped in the custard and so the inside just tastes toast, because that’s all it is. Light, really crunchy. Nice. if you’re into that. These are my pieces, which are much heavier because they soaked up some custard. They’re still basically dry at the very center, but much more of their girth is custard, and the custard cooked though because we baked this.

Whatever you do, definitely take time to dry the bread before you French toast it. When the bread is still fresh and moist inside it just kinda collapses in the pan. It comes out floppy and smashed flat. This is still kinda airy inside, which is why it is crispy. Crunch plus air equals crisp. And bread plus butter and egg and cream equals Sunday morning breakfast, in my book.