Right bread takes French toast

By Sarah Fritschner
Louisville Courier-Journal

There are three ingredients necessary to make perfect French toast.

Bread, milk and eggs, right?

Wrong. The three ingredients for perfect French toast are good bread, patience and practice.

Serviceable French toast can be made by dipping Wonder bread into an egg-and-milk bath before frying it.

But perfect French toast can be created only with time. Time and patience result in French toast that elicits compliments even from people who don't usually notice (adolescent boys). Time and practice yield French toast that makes you a welcome houseguest (you cook, your hosts eat).

Perfect French toast starts with day-old French bread or a country-style loaf that might be older still. It can be fabulous bread purchased at the best bakery in town, or it can be a supermarket baguette.

The bread should have a firm crumb all the way through. That means that it's going to fight back a little when you saw through it with a serrated knife. Exercise patience and your bicep; slice the bread about 1 inch thick.

The term "day-old" is used often in recipes, but its meaning is imprecise. We all know day-old mass-produced, pre-sliced loaves (like Wonder and Rainbo) will have virtually the same texture today, tomorrow and next Tuesday, until it molds.

On the other hand, the "crumb" of a good-quality, preservative-free yeast breads get firmer over time.

This firm texture throughout is the first step to fabulous French toast. It can be a day old, or two days old, or older. (I've made good French toast with crust so hard that it shatters when I begin slicing; there should be some give to the interior, however.)

This dry bread is dipped into a liquid mixture of milk and eggs. The drier the bread, the more liquid it will absorb; experience with the process will help guide you when to use more, or less.

To produce a rich, custardy interior, you'll want a lot of eggs relative to the milk.

The exact amounts of eggs and milk are difficult to measure. It all depends on the bread, and how thickly sliced it is, how dry it is, how large the slices are and how long it steeps.

The general guideline is: Use more eggs than you'd use for pancake batter but fewer than for scrambled eggs.

For eight baguette slices cut 1-inch thick on the diagonal, the ballpark figure would be three eggs and one cup of milk. But that's just an estimate.

Beat the eggs first (I use a fork), so that the dark yellow yolk becomes bright lemon-colored. Then beat in the milk.

If I'm soaking eight slices of (baguette) bread, I beat the eggs in the bottom of a 9-by-13-inch baking pan and then beat in the milk. Add the bread, let it sit for five minutes, then turn it over.

Now you need patience.

Cover the pan with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight. If your bread has a firm crumb, it truly needs overnight (or at least a full day) for the custard to seep into every nook and cranny of bread, so that the interior of every slice is like a delicious bread pudding. Twenty minutes of soaking won't make fabulous French toast.

Patience is needed again when you cook it.

Perfect French toast has a crisp, golden exterior and a soft, pudding interior. You need enough oil in the pan so that the entire surface of the bread is coated (about /-inch). It should be hot enough to sizzle when the bread is added, but not so hot that it burns outside before cooking through on the inside.

Total cooking time may be 15 minutes, and though you can peek under the bread to see how it's progressing, you're aiming to flip the pieces only once.

The amount of heat under the pan requires attention and experience. Cooks who use a black cast-iron pan should use more caution than those using a shiny silver non-stick surface. The cast-iron pans more easily burn the toast, so the heat must be gentler, and the toast could take longer to cook.

In the end, you'll have French toast that inspires you to linger over Saturday breakfast. And it will satisfy you enough to skip lunch, so you can spend the whole day getting your hands dirty – digging in the garden, working on the car, cleaning the basement, accomplishing those resolutions one by one.