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French toast invented by the favorite cook of King Herod III in the 4th century AD. It was created for a feast to celebrate the slaughter of Prussian Orthodox Christians. I just made all that up, but it sounds right, doesn't it? In reality, French toast was kind of invented by the Romans in the first century and then perfected by the French in some other century and now today optimized by me. History is a beautiful thing. This episode is sponsored by Wild Grain, the first ever bake from frozen subscription box for sourdough bread, fresh pastas, and pastries. Every Wild Grain product bakes from frozen in 25 minutes or less. No thawing required.
You can build your box with the items you want, from bread to croissants to cookies. Or you can choose a gluten-free box, a vegan box, or their new protein box. Try Wild Grain for yourself. Use code Babage to get $30 off your first box, plus free croissants in every order. The croissant is actually pronounced quissant. How should we be pronouncing French toast? Well, the actually the original pronunciation for French toast is frog. So, to start this French toast journey, we first need to make the toast, which before it becomes toast is actually something called bread. So, we're going to make some bread, but not just any bread. I'm going to try to imitate the pondi from Benqui, a local
high-end bakery here in New York City. So, we're going to start with a pish. This is a basic pre-ferment that's going to improve flavor and texture and appearance. 150 g each flour and milk with like a/4 teaspoon of instant yeast. Mix that together until all the flour is hydrated. Cover it and let it ferment at room temperature for 12 to 24 hours. The next day, you're going to find that the pish has grown a little bit. It's gotten bubbly, stretchy, and it's got a lovely tangy, yeasty, fermented smell. Now, to get ready to make our bread, we're first going to measure each of our ingredients. I've got 289 g of whole milk, 525 g of bread flour, 27 g of granulated sugar, 13.5 g of kosher salt, 3.4 g of instant yeast, 1.7 g of
diastatic malt powder. Totally optional, but it's going to improve our loaf's texture and flavor, and 40 g of room temperature unsalted butter. We're going to combine all of these ingredients except for the butter in the bowl of our stand mixer along with the pish. Mix until no dry patches remain. You got a kind of a shaggy dough going. And then add our butter one little piece at a time, waiting for it to be fully emulsified into the dough before adding the next. After that, we're going to knead for an additional 5 to 7 minutes for 10 to 12 minutes total kneading time. We need really good gluten development. Otherwise, the loaf will come out short and crumbly, and it's also not going to have the strength that
it needs to hold together in the custard soak of French toast. So, once we have our dough where we want it, we're going to roll it into a tight, taut little ball. Then, we're going to place it in an oiled bowl, cover it with plastic wrap, and frriging it for 16 hours. This is going to be our initial cold ferment. When you cold ferment, what is it that's actually happening to the yeast? Excellent question. Anytime you take a dough and put it in the fridge, what you're doing is retarding the yeast's ability to consume sugar and produce carbon dioxide. And this retardation creates some wonderful flavors and deeper browning.
What? You said the rword. Well, yeah, but I said it in the context of baking, which is the that's the actual term. Is that allowed? It has to be. After 16 hours, we're taking out the dough and we're going to shape it into a log. Now, when the dough comes out of the fridge, it's round and I want it to be a rectangle. The best way I could figure was to cut it in half. Cut one of those halves into two pieces and stack those two pieces on top of the other half to try to make a sort of pseudo rectangle. Then, I'm rolling that out to a much larger rectangle the same width as my intended
loaf pan. So, about 13 in wide. Then I'm very carefully and very tightly rolling that into a log, making sure that I'm not trapping any air bubbles and thoroughly sealing the seam shut on the bottom, pinching, stretching, smearing. Then we're going to invert that, place that into a generously buttered Pullman pan, cover with plastic wrap and the lid, and ferment once again for another 12 hours. So once that comes out of the fridge, we're going to let it rise for anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes, depending on the temperature of your kitchen. If it's very cold, it's going to take longer to rise. is if it's warmer, it's going to take less time to rise. Simple thermodynamics, I assume.
Basically, we want the dough to reach 80 to 85% of the height of the pan before putting in the oven. Now, for the oven, we've preheated it to 450° F. We're going to give it an initial hot bake with the lid on for 10 minutes before reducing the temperature to 400° F, baking for another 25 minutes. Then, we're taking off the lid and baking for another 10 to 15 minutes. Then we're going to remove it, put it on a rack, and let it cool completely, at least 4 hours before slicing and doing anything with it. But as you can see, for the most part, it's an exemplary sandwich loaf with a deep, complex, almost caramelized flavor on the outside. The crust looks fantastic.
Normally not a big crust guy, but when it comes to French toast, it adds a wonderful layer of crunch and depth of flavor. You can also see that the texture of the bread when I squish it, it bounces back. It has tremendous strength and resilience. Means that it's going to be able to soak up a lot of custard without losing its structure and turning into mush. Haters love to say American breakfast is too sweet. So why doesn't this French breakfast get the same criticism? Haters by their own nature are going to hate. If the hater you're referring to is Johnny Harris, then I have to agree with whatever he says by default because damn, he's good.
Now, before we French any of this toast, we need to make our toppings. First up, I'm going to make a blueberry compost using preserved lemon. Preserved lemons have this really wonderful, almost savory, unuous flavor to them. A slight bitterness, so we're not going to do too much. I'm just going to take about a quarter of this preserved lemon, finely chop it, and add it to taste. And I don't want the compost to be too sweet. We have a lot of sweetness going into this, and I want it to taste more of berries than of sugar. So, I'm doing two cups of blueberries to 1 cup of sugar. I'm also going to add our preserved lemon and a hefty pinch of salt. Bring that up to a simmer for 5 to 10 minutes. Let all that fruit break down. Let all the flavors
get to know each other. Give it a taste for seasoning. Mine needed acid, so I added some fresh lemon juice to bring some zing. And it wouldn't hurt you if you threw a little splash of vanilla in there. Vanilla extract, vanilla paste. Either way, it's going to add a little bit more depth and complexity of flavor. So, that's going to be a perfect combo for our French toast. Now on to the syrup. And we're not just doing any plain jane whatever out of a bottle syrup. We don't roll like that, do we, Babish Nation? Instead of making a pancake syrup that's inspired by Sam Yu of Golden Diner, a mixture of 1 cup real maple syrup, none of that fake stuff, one tablespoon of red miso, and a little
splash of mirin. I'm going to bring this up to a bare simmer just to get everything dissolved and mixed together. I'm also going to add a little splash of some of this spiced rum. You can just use Captain Morgans's, but I happen to have a little tub of this homemade stuff. Then I'm finishing things up with 2 Tbsp of butter. This makes for a pancake syrup whose sweetness, richness, and deliciousness cannot be properly described by me with my mouth and brain here today. Now, I really like French toast with whipped cream, but when it's just whipped cream, it's only adding more fat and richness. It's not adding any other characteristics. So, I want to make sort of a cream cheese frosting whipped cream. if you will, but
instead of cream cheese, I'm going to use creme fresh cuz it sounds fancier. Basically, I'm going to combine 1 cup of heavy cream, 1/4 cup of creme fresh, 1 tbsp of sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, and a/ teaspoon of vanilla extract in the bowl of a stand mixer. Whip it up to stiff peaks. And there you have it. A lovely sweet whipped cream with a nice tang of creme fresh. For those that are curious, what is English toast? English toast is plain old dry ass bread with a side of nothing and butter kept neatly in the fridge. Now on to something just as important as the toast itself, the French or the custard, the stuff that you soak the bread in. I'm starting with six large egg yolks. We're only going with egg
yolks here. That's going to bring lots of fat, richness, and an improved texture. Then I'm adding 1 and 1/2 cups each milk and heavy cream or just three cups of half and half because that's the same. I'm also adding the zest of one orange. This is going to bring a lovely orange zest flavor. 2 tablespoons of granulated sugar. I'm also going to add about a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Something else that the blender is going to be great for is incorporating spices. If you just whisk ground spices into a custard, they just kind of end up floating on the top. But if you blend them in, they incorporate much better. And for spices, I'm doing a/ teaspoon each nutmeg, cardamom, and cinnamon. Blend until completely smooth.
And there it is, our French toast custard. Now, before we can turn this toast into French toast, we first need to stale it. You can either do this in a low oven, like 200° for 1 hour until they're nice and dry on the outside, but still a little soft on the inside, or just let it sit out and stale overnight. If you start with fully hydrated bread, you're going to end up with pretty mushy French toast because it's going to soak up all this custard and already has all this moisture in it. Now, with the custard, you could, of course, pour it out into a bowl and dip the toast one at a time. But a much more efficient way to do things is to place all the toast in a rimmed baking sheet, a nice highwalled rim baking sheet, and pouring the custard over top, making sure that
you hit the top of each piece of toast with the custard, and then letting it soak, flipping halfway through. Now, how long do you soak? This is going to depend on a number of factors. The biggest two being the dryness of your bread and your personal preferences. I want just a smidgen of actual bread in the center of my toast and the rest of it thoroughly filled with that custard and that richness and that French toast flavor. And my toast was really dried out and I let it soak for about 45 minutes. Once your French toast is soaked to your liking, you can do the classic thing. Fry it in butter and serve it with syrup. Tale as old as time. That's what French toast is.
Wow. So, here's why I love this versus normal French toast. The French toast itself was not sweetened very much, nor was the fruit spread. Really, you're getting most of the sweetness from that little bit of sugar was sprinkled on there, but most of it's coming from the syrup. I could crush this whole plate. It's remarkable. [snorts] It's a very balanced, very decadent, gorgeously flavored French toast. I love it. All that to be said, I want to try something different. I want to make brulee French toast because what we have here is a fried sugary exterior. So, I want to bring the glassy crispness that comes with brulee and put it in the French toast format.
What do you say to those calling creme brulee French toast to French? Well, to them I would say, "Is there such a thing as too French?" And they would say, "Yes." And I would say, "Where is the line?" And they would say, "You're being pedantic right now." I'd say, "You're being an right now." And they'd say, "Well, you say, "Well, you then we'd come to blows." As so often happens, fisty cuffs would turn to a passionate kiss that um would be immediately withdrawn because we're both married. Would it be a French kiss? I'm borrowing a technique I've seen Nick Diovani and the New York Times do. Basically, we're making a mixture of half cup of butter to one cup of dark brown sugar, melting that in a saucepan, stirring until homogenized, and then
spreading it on the bottom of a non-stick rimmed baking sheet. Then, I'm digging out my soaked toasts and then just shingling them on top of the sugar mixture in the rim baking sheet. Then this whole guy is going into a preheated 375° Fahrenheit oven for about 25 minutes. Then I'm going to take them out, flip them onto a non-stick rack, brulee side up. Then you can either keep it on the rack and throw it under the broiler to get it nice and crisp or put it back into our original non-stick rimmed baking sheet and just bake it for another 10 to 15 minutes to really crisp up the sugar on top and give us a brulelike French toast. There you have We have our rich, creamy French toast with a crunchy sugar topping ready
to be plated and enjoyed. And just listen to how crispy this is. And I'm going to top that up with our preserved lemon blueberry compost, a big scoop of our creme fresh chantelli. It's just not French toast without a generous sprinkling of powdered sugar, and of course, our bespoke red miso pancake syrup. And all there's left to do is try it. For more, we're headed to the studio where Babish is about to take his first bite. Ooh. There's still a really good crunch to it. Look. Oh man, the sweetness is coming specifically from the brulee and the syrup. The French toast itself, the berries, these are sources of richness and acid and spice. Not only does that diversify the flavors
and let different flavors and sweetnesses and textures hit your mouth at different times, but also it just balances out the sweet. So, this is not so sickly sweet as French toast usually is. Even with the brulee, that's unbelievable. I love the acid hit from those really lemony blueberries. Not only the tops nice and crunchy, the crust of that bread is really something special. Because of the slow fermentation, it forms almost a flaky layered exterior and that gets translated all the way through to the end product. The crusts of this bread for once are maybe the best part. They're coated in crystalline sugar and they have an almost, you know, halfway between a brios or a quasant kind of flakiness and lightness.
So much flavor. I really hope you guys give this one a try for yourselves. It's very labor intensive, but worth it. And if not, I hope that you picked up a tip or trick that you might put to use in your next batch of French toast. Thank you so much for watching. Please comment below what you want to see me make next on this show. What you want to see me do or wear or say or think. Whatever it is, it'll all be right here with Babish. Thanks again to Wild Grain for sponsoring this episode. I'm not expecting everyone to make their own bread from scratch for French toast, so I recommend the Wild Grain Croissant Loaf as a less laborintensive option that tastes incredible. They use simple
ingredients in a slow fermentation process that can be easier on your stomach and richer in nutrients. As a bonus, you're helping Wild Grain give back. With every box ordered, you donate two meals to a food security nonprofit of your choice at no extra cost. Try Wild Grain for yourself. Use code Babage to get $30 off your first box, plus free croissants in every order.
