French Toast For When You’re Feeling Fancy

“What’s for breakfast tomorrow?” My brother asks this question every Friday and Saturday. During the week it’s “what’s for dinner?”

For a grown man who is more into fitness and health than anyone I have ever personally known, he sure is food obsessed.

“French toast.” I respond, offhand, because I can always throw together some french toast.

The problem is that I only had the honey wheat bread that I buy from Costco in the kitchen. And I just do not like French toast made with regular bread. It works. You can do it. But why? If you’re going to make French toast, make French toast.

French toast should be fancy, it should be made with artisan bread, sprinkles of powdered sugar on top, a little sweet flavor in the egg mixture. It should come with eggs, bacon or sausage, fruit, and all the deliciousness of a too big American Sunday morning breakfast/brunch.

Needless to say, French toast was not on the menu Saturday morning. I didn’t want to jump out of bed and run out to the store. But I had always wanted to experiment with pancakes from scratch, and I had everything I needed on hand for that, so I did. I tried a recipe online and tweaked it a bit. I’ll play around a bit more before posting it here.

Later that day, I took a trip to the store and loaded up on eggs and artisan bread, the two staples I was missing for the dish, and I put together a fabulous French toast brunch.

Here, from my table to yours, is what I did.

French Toast For When You’re Feeling Fancy (Serves 6)

Ingredients:

1 loaf artisan bread, unsliced or thickly sliced. Get something special. I found a nice fluffy white bread at Safeway in their bakery section. When I’m at Trader Joe’s I buy a loaf of their brioche bread. You want something you would never otherwise buy, something fancy and full of dangerous fat and sugar.

4 eggs

1/2 cup milk

1 teaspoon extract (I prefer orange, but you could use lemon or almond, something distinct. Not vanilla. It doesn’t pop.)

1 tablespoon of sugar

Vegetable Oil

Ingredients for Sides:

Sausage or bacon

10 eggs

Fresh Fruit

Olive oil

Salt

Condiments:

Powdered Sugar

Butter

Syrup

Ketchup (if you’re weird like my brother and my daughter, and you put ketchup on your eggs.)

Preparation:

Heat large skillet on medium high and coat bottom of pan with vegetable oil (you want your bread to fry, not just cook on the outside)

Beat 4 eggs and add 1/2 cup milk in a large flat baking dish

Add extract and sugar, mix

Cut your bread into thick slices, then cut each slice in half from corner to corner, to make triangles.

Dip your bread slices quickly into mixture and place immediately in the pan, one at a time. You do not want your bread to soak in the egg mixture because then it will not cook through, and you’ll have soggy toast. Yuck.

Fry toast until it is golden brown, a couple of minutes, on each side. You’ll be doing this in batches, as you won’t have enough room in your skillet to cook an entire loaf of bread.

Meanwhile, heat a skillet on medium heat and add olive oil once around the pan.

Beat 10 eggs together and season with salt.

Add eggs to skillet when your hand above the pan can clearly feel the heat.

Remember to mix your eggs every minute or so, once the egg on the bottom of the pan has settled. This will yield you firm big chunks of eggs. Remove from heat just as the eggs are cooked through so they don’t dry out.

For your sausage, follow the directions on the package. I typically buy links that are uncooked, but this week I bought some precooked from Costco. I don’t love them, but they work in a pinch. I cook my sausage, all my breakfast meat really, in a cast iron skillet. The metal gets a good crisp on the outside of the meat while keeping it moist inside. A good trick with sausage if you feel it is starting to burn is to add a little water to the pan and stir, so the crispy flavor gets all over the outside of the links. You can keep doing this as the water cooks off until the sausage is cooked through.

For your fruit: cut it up! Melon is great for Sunday brunch, grapes are easy, and apples are a last resort for me because we eat them all week long.

Once everything is done, put all of your dishes on separate platters and serve buffet style. This way, you’re not overfeeding or underfeeding anyone. Sprinkle powdered sugar on the French toast and leave a little bowl of the sugar on the table with a spoon. Melt the butter to just soft, not melted. Place butter, syrup, and ketchup (if you’re weird) on the table.

Prepare to be worshipped (even by the littlest members of your family!)

Et voila! French toast for feeling fancy.

Please leave comments or feedback if you try this recipe and love it or hate it. Also, I’d love to hear what you do to jazz up your french toast. Let’s talk!

*PS: The link to the cast iron skillet in this post will take you to Amazon, in case you want to buy one like the one I have at home. If you click on this link and buy it, or anything else, I will get a small commission from Amazon. So you will be supporting my writing, my recipes, and this site.