Chef Frank Makes the Best French Toast

i'm chef frank this is proto cooks and today one of my childhood favorites french toast [Music] before we start making our french toast i want to talk about today's sponsor one dream one dream has a huge catalog of short and long form videos how to's documentaries it's got a little bit of everything and one of the things that i really want to learn is how to bake baking is my kryptonite i say it all the time i am not a good baker one of the courses i'm watching right now is by sim cass who happens to be one of my former colleagues someone i've always wanted to take a baking class with but never had a chance to and he has a bagel bialy and pretzel class that i am so excited to take he's a world around baker he is one of the nicest people we ever meet something that i learned from his bagel class that was mind-blowing to me is the reason why they put a hole in the bagel right couple of reasons actually they could carry them around on a stick or a string they bake quicker and they get a nicer crust on the outside i know that people that watch my channel love to learn and that's why one dream is such a great fit for our channel one dream's offering a free trial for my viewers you should give it a try i think you're going to love it please visit onedrive.com backslash protocooks there's also going to be a link down in the description so you can sign up now thanks mondrian for sponsoring this video it's absolutely delicious i know i mean amazing it's absolutely amazing french toast holds a special place in my heart because when i was a kid my dad would work overnights and occasionally he would come home and make us breakfast in the morning before school and french toast is one of those dishes that he made that really kind of stuck with me my version is a little more fancier like pink in the air chef style but it's absolutely delicious and you have to try it let's talk about french toast and the reason why it's called french toast the french have a dish that's called panpardu excuse my french feel free to correct me in the comments but it basically means lost bread and it's stale or old bread that they soaked in cream and eggs and a little bit of sugar and cooked to save the bread right they would use it to use up old bread and making something beautiful with it this is what you're gonna need for my french toast milk half and half eggs sugar salt vanilla ground cinnamon ground nutmeg orange zest and hala bread a couple of things on the side here i have whipped butter whipped salted butter and pure maple syrup you're going to need that as well that's our garnish the first ingredient i want to talk about is the bread i like to use a braided hollow bread now braided hollow bread it's braided it has a lot of nice texture and doesn't fall apart holla bread is basically a close cousin to brioche but not made with butter there's no dairy in this bread okay uh the other bread you can get is a brioche i get this from my local trader joe's they don't sponsor this yet uh but brioche is really nice it's a super buttery bread but i do find sometimes this falls apart a little so that's why i go for the braided hollow bread if you don't have halo bread just use a nice sturdy white bread another thing i want to talk about is what you put on your french toast and i like a really good maple syrup yes it's a little more expensive pancake syrup at the supermarket is much cheaper but you don't need as much of this my wife and daughter prefer pancake syrup to this my son and i eat this we're a little more fancy i guess but you should try real maple syrup if you get a chance the other thing i like to put on my french toast is salted butter nothing like that combination of sweet and salty i use break stones whipped butter this is what my grandmother used and it makes every every time i see this i think of my grandmother it's got the right amount of salt it has some airiness to it and fluffiness to it and when this mixes with that maple syrup on top of our french toast it is heaven let's get our egg and cream mixture together super simple you put everything in a bowl and blend it up i'm going to use a stick blender you can use a regular blender or a whisk but i find a stick blender works really well to get the cinnamon incorporated uh i just remember growing up and my dad would put cinnamon in and it would kind of clump up at the top and the first few slices would taste like cinnamon and the last few slices wouldn't so if you put it in a blender or use an immersion blender that cinnamon gets dispersed so much better okay let's put the eggs in let's do my dad taught me that too half and half milk salt salt's a flavor enhancer you have to make sure you put salt in you don't need a lot just enough to enhance the flavor here ground cinnamon or nutmeg sugar i don't really measure my vanilla i just kind of give it a nice splash of vanilla and then i'm gonna put some orange zest in there this is something that uh i love i love orange zest in my french toast and i'm just gonna do maybe five or six swipes whenever using the microplane you want to just go over it once you want to just keep on grading you just want to use that nice orange rind and not use any of the pith i always give this a little tap you can see that it falls off i also do this over the bowl so i get some of that nice orange oil in there too all right and all we have to do now is get our stick blender in there and blend it up [Music] all right that's it all i want to do is let this sit for about a half hour let the flavors kind of blend let's slice our bread i like thick slices for this you can see the inside of the holla it has a nice crumb to it but this is about probably about one inch slices this has a nice texture on the inside because it's braided it holds together and it'll stand up really nice i'm gonna make about four or five slices usually as i get to kind of the tapered end if it's a little smaller i'll make the slices slightly thicker and in the olden times what they would probably do is they'd let this sit out and go a little stale and dry so that it absorbed more of the cream and egg mixture what we want to do next is soak our bread now you got to be really careful with this if your bread is super firm and has a good crumb like the challah you can let it soak for a few minutes but if you're going to use brioche it's going to fall apart so you got to be really careful for this hollow bread i'm going to let it soak for about five minutes at the end of the day i want this to be kind of custardy in the middle my wife and my daughter do not like it custard in the middle but i do like it custardy in the middle that's really hard to say so i'm gonna just throw these in and kind of move them around and let them soak for about three to five minutes and then we cook get them in there awesome make sure you get it everywhere i swear i'm not doing that on purpose it just happens all right so let these soak all right let's cook let's cook okay let's cook this french toast i'm going to turn on the heat and i'm going to go kind of over a medium heat i don't want to be too hot i don't want butter to get brown right off the bat so i have my butter and i'm just going to put a fair amount i want this to have a lot of nice butter flavor this is kind of part of it you know like the butter is going to get lightly brown it has a little salt to it right so let's get the butter melted i know i'm like a savage with the butter right but the french toast will soak it up right and that's what i want you can see that our french toast right now is kind of a little squishy you got to be a little careful with it and that's how i want i want it to be soaked fully through i'm going over low heat so that everything inside cooks this is basically a custard it's going to have that nice kind of custardy inside so i let it drain get all the excess off and i'm gonna lay it in my pan i'm probably gonna get four slices in here even though i made five let the excess drain squeeze it out with a little if it's too much all right we can let it cook on this side let it start to set if it's too hot you see your butter's getting brown just lower the heat let me check the bottoms here okay we're getting some nice brown one thing i want to be careful about is when you flip these we don't want to push down i've seen people with french toast and pancakes they flip things and they push them down and that's all that's doing is taking the air out and taking any of that fluffiness out and making it too dense so when it comes to this stuff we'd never want to push down on it all right i think it's time to flip look at that that one can use a little more time we might have to flip it back that is beautiful beautiful and golden brown and now this is kind of like where we're gonna let the custard on the inside set it's on kind of low heat we're just gonna let this go for a little while so that it's not wet on the inside it's just kind of like fluffy and moist right let me go back to the other side flip it over we got some nice color good well that got a little dark let me shift these shift these around all right time to plate and i'm going to show you how i like to plate it because i love my butter so i get a nice chunk of butter and my wife always kind of like looks at this like i'm crazy i like to put a chunk of butter on the bottom of my plate i'm only going to plate up two pieces but i have this really beautiful piece right here and then like a savage another little chunk of butter there and then my other piece on top and then another little chunk of butter on top don't go too crazy right and then uh syrup my maple syrup uh you don't need to drown it in this this is a really nice amber but you do need to give it a fair amount and that is my french toast it's the moment of truth time to taste our french toast i want you to get a good look at this okay take a good look at this look at the syrup and the butter swirling and mixing together this is the way it should be almost the same amount of butter as syrup so let's give it a taste i'm going to cut a little piece from this side the inside is kind of nice not dried out a little bit of butter a nice chunk of butter on there the sweet and saltiness of it uh the french toast is super light and fluffy just a little custardy in the middle one of my favorite things in the world french toast if you enjoyed this video give us a thumbs up like and subscribe we have merch down in the description we also have a p.o box down there i want to thank our patreon sponsors for helping us out and i'd also like to make a special thank you to one dream for sponsoring this video today thank you so much that's french toast i'm chef frank this is protocooks have a good one [Music]

Channel: ProtoCooks with Chef Frank

Views: 25,643

Keywords: #painperdue, #Frenchtoast, #wondrium, #cheffrank, #cheffrankproto, #syrup, #maplesyrup, #butter

Id: abeaDiUkDJs

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021