The Secrets of Not Failing at Cooking: French Toast

By Nicole L. Barry

In as much as my mother is in fact, a Nazi about my cooking adventures, she was also a Nazi about me having friends over. That being said, when I did have friends over, there were two things that were going down for certain. One: I was putting makeup on you. Two: We were having French toast for breakfast.

French toast is one of those classic breakfast items that unless it's stuffed and doused in a million different bastardizations at IHOP, doesn't get much attention. Ironically, this is one of the few items I don't like over complicating with a million a different incarnations. Pancakes I do up a la mode, with fruit, with whipped cream, with pretty much everything. French toast is excellent in its simplicity and reaches perfection in those same mechanizations.

I realize that this lesson may have already reached the ears of the select few of you who managed to see one of the two episodes of my cooking show that made it to air on SBU-TV, since breakfast was my first topic. It's fundamental, and since that episode hasn't aired in over a year, it's worthwhile to express the same lesson in written form.

If you have fantastic ingredients, it's not hard to create something brilliant. If I had high quality bread, fresh dairy cream and eggs, pure vanilla extract or, better yet, vanilla beans and fresh spices I grated myself, well, there's no doubt that would be better than what I could serve you in my kitchen back upstate, and certainly here in my dorm kitchen. But I've got tricks up my sleeve that makes regular white bread, these crappy Long Island milk and eggs, imitation vanilla extract, and 99 cent spices come out to be something pretty tasty. Technique can save pretty much everything.

French toast is essentially bread custard pan-fried. I've had bad French toast on multiple occasions. Nothing can adequately express my feelings on that plane except a shudder.
First: the batter. If nothing else, you need eggs and milk, mixed in slightly equal proportions, with a slight favor to the milk. This, by itself, does nothing in the fantastic department. Make sure you mix the two well and you don't have bits of egg white chilling in the mix, unincorporated. What brings French toast to a higher level composition wise is vanilla, cinnamon, and nutmeg. All three. You really can’t overdo the vanilla; you want a generous amount of cinnamon, and some nutmeg to give it the depth of flavor and that special edge. I never make French toast without all of these elements.

Next: the bread. Now, I can make French toast even out of that ubiquitous generic white fluff known as wonder bread, but a standard white bread made of slightly hardier stuff, like an Italian sandwich bread, or pretty much any white bread that inst wonder bread, will do better. You can do it up in whole pieces, standard, or cut them into strips like I used to do at home for ease of cooking, flipping, and serving. Both work.

Now here comes the actual brilliance of the French toast construction. Have you ever had a piece of French toast that was dry in the middle, or one that had some egg mess going on on the side? I know you have, even if you weren't aware of it. Or maybe one that was just soggy through and through? What are these poor people doing wrong? It's because they've not mixed up the liquid properly, then they are dipping and throwing directly into the pan.

If you're using sandwich bread, and you almost always will, especially if you're still reading this far- the dipping technique is crucial. You dip, flip, and then remove to a plate- not immediately into the frying pan. When you dip and flip the bread in the liquid, you have to do it fast and get it out just as quickly as you put it in. Sandwich bread is so insubstantial that it soaks up way too much liquid way too fast. The briefest encounter with the liquid on either side is sufficient. You want it to soak up just enough that when it sits on the plate, the liquid soaks through all the bread evenly without being too much, and in effect, letting the bread become what it should be at the pinnacle of its production- a bread custard. I will coat all my bread pieces first; stick them all on a plate before I even turn on the stove.

You want the pan hot, but not too hot, because you don't want the outsides to cook without cooking the inside, a technique useful for steak but not here. Also, don't over oil the pan, spraying liberally with cooking spray is enough.

(Also, while I'm thinking about it- don't over-oil or butter the pan when you make pancakes. I love my dad, no lie, but his pancakes used to be pretty awful, and I'm thinking that scoop of margarine that he added to the pan every time was the culprit, seeing as otherwise you make them all the same when you're using Bisquick. No, scratch that, I'm positive. I did work in a restaurant. You don't add extra oil when you make pancakes. Pancakes are sponges for oil!)

So, the actual cooking part of French toast is the most idiot proof element. Once it's cooked, you're golden. Keep all your fancy fixings away from this French toast. It doesn't even need butter- maple syrup, or, for a change of pace, jam or preserves will do excellently.