This vanilla french toast recipe is just about the easiest soul food breakfast to serve up for yourself, your family, overnight guests, or crushes. And not just on the weekends, because since Corona and the lockdown fuss I’ve also missed one thing a lot: sitting in a beautiful café with friends and treating myself to breakfast. Pancakes, waffles, Eggs Benedict, granola parfait, avocado toast deluxe, latte macchiato or even two: French toast. I find it even nicer to have breakfast together (and for quite a long time) or to chat and enjoy together in the hotel with friends in the morning than to go to dinner together. For real.
But it’s not there right now. Friends are all too far away, as are the cafés in question and you can whine, of course, but it doesn’t help, I thought to myself and instead of granola in the morning or a sandwich, there have often been homemade luxury breakfasts in the last few months. For this simple French toast recipe (also known as French toast) you really only need milk, eggs, vanilla and powdered sugar, zack.
You can really hit the toppings. Throw on what your culinary heart desires. Whether powdered sugar, candied almonds, banana slices, maple syrup, honey, berries, chocolate sauce, or ice cream, everything is allowed. Today I mixed raspberries and crème Fraiche with my homemade strawberry-limoncello jam on top sent good music to the Bluetooth box and started the day happily.
Incidentally, French toast is also called pain perdu in French, i.e. lost bread, because you can use bread from the day before that would otherwise have gone over the Wupper.
Here is the extremely simple French Toast recipe, which I quickly flavoured with real vanilla:
INGREDIENTS:
FOR THE FRENCH TOAST:
200ml milk (I like to use whole milk here, but reduced-fat is also possible)
scraped pulp of a vanilla bean
2 eggs
60g powdered sugar
1 pinch of cinnamon (optional)
6 slices (approx. 1.5cm thick) brioche or yeast-plaited bread
approx. 100g butter for frying
AS A TOPPING
powdered sugar
Almond or hazelnut slicer
maple syrup
Sugar Cinnamon (and Love)
Berries or bananas or pineapple or kiwi
chocolate cream
Creme fraîche or Greek yoghurt
ice cream, or or or
PREPARATION:
Preheat the oven to 180°C if you plan on keeping the French toast warm (especially advisable if you have guests and are making more French toast).
Meanwhile, heat the milk and the scraped seeds of the vanilla pod in a small saucepan on the hob, but do not bring to a boil. Then pour into a deep plate or a casserole dish that is not too large (because we will need space for the brioche slices later, they will be dipped in this) and leave to cool.
Whisk the eggs briefly and add to the vanilla milk with the icing sugar (optionally cinnamon). Mix everything homogeneously with a whisk * (advertising link).
Now nudge the brioche bread slices one after the other into this egg mixture and let it soak briefly. The bread should be completely soaked with the eggs, but not so soggy that it tears.
Heat a pan* on the hob. Melt a quarter of the butter in it and now gradually fry the French toast brioche slices on both sides (about 3 minutes, turning once in between). It’s done when it’s nicely browned on both sides and no longer wobbly. Meanwhile stir the egg mixture again, because the small vanilla dots like to sink to the bottom and then add the next brioche to the egg mixture.
Wipe out the pan with kitchen paper from time to time between the individual baking processes and heat new butter in it.
Keep the finished French toast warm in the oven on a baking tray lined with baking paper.
Dust with powdered sugar, serve with fruit, maple syrup, ice cream, or whatever your taste suggests. And while warm, cold French toast isn’t all that popular unless that’s how you like it.
