Cooking Adventure: French Toast - THE RECKONING

I have a dear friend - McK who is one of the manliest men I know. He plays video games, shoots guns, saves the world and cooks.

If you look past all the wide, smiling faces of TV chef personalities, you see the inherent danger and excitement of cooking. Knives! Fire! Mallets! Slicing! Stabbing!

Did I mention fire?

McK makes manly food - filling, flavorful and tons of it. In the post Cooking Misadventure: French Toast, McK left a comment with his own recipe. Today, I make that recipe.

Ingredients:

Wheat bred (McK specified Roman wheat bread, but I'm not sure what that is)
Eggs
Milk or water (optional)

Time to pray!

Milk/egg ratio should be 1 part milk to 4 parts eggs. Mix the eggs and milk in a flat-bottomed bowl for optimum dunking. My favorite flat-bottomed bowl was in the fridge holding a giant watermelon, so I decided to be lazy (and hungry) and use the next best thing.

I was wary of trying another French toast recipe, so I only used two pieces of bread and two eggs. I'm not sure how much milk I used - maybe 1/4 of a cup. I'm not sure about the measurement of a large egg.

After the previous French toast debacle, I was extremely wary about this attempt. The fact that when I cracked the eggs they both caved in on themselves - leaving me to hold a mass of broken shells and goop - did not give me hope that this would turn out any better. It seemed like an ill omen.

Also, the kitchen walls were bleeding.

Butter a pan with salted butter on a medium-low flame. McK helpfully informs us that using oil will make the French toast taste eggy, which isn't good. He also lets us know that burning the butter will make the French toast taste better. I decided to brown the butter to test this.

French-toast-making station. The picture is blurry because I was beset by a flock of lesser demons.

Lay a piece of bread flat in the eggs, then flip it over, then immediately set in the hot pan. Fill up the pan with the pre-French toast. I had a round pan, so this did not take long.

If I had to cook for guests, I calculate it would take about 4,000,000,000 hours until everyone was served.

Cook until the French toast gets kind of brown on each side.

I also threw in some summer sausage. And holy water.

Remove from pan. McK: "Re-butter the pan for any following frenching of toasts." Serve with whatever you want. I, like McK, prefer butter and syrup.

It was with great trepidation that I approached this French toast. I expected something bland or maybe tough or perhaps dry. It was none of these. I swear when I took a bite that the heavens parted and there was an angel chorus. The darkness was banished. This was proper French toast. Paired with summer sausage, it made for a highly satisfying - nay, highly amazing - lunch.

Breakfast for lunch is awesome, beaten only by breakfast for dinner.

Happy cooking!

Cooking Misadventure: French Toast

I bought a loaf of brioche at the farmer's market this Sunday. It's an egg bread that is good for French toast. This loaf was thick-sliced just for this purpose. I decided to see what the talented Alton Brown did to make French toast, and followed that recipe.

It tasted like broken dreams.

The first step was the make the egg mixture. Simple enough.

There was going to be a picture of the egg mixture here, but it has apparently fled, too ashamed to appear in this post. So here's a baby panda instead.

The second step was to soak the bread in the egg mixture. I had halved the recipe in case this turned into a disaster (accurate prediction) and used only three slices of bread. I over-soaked the first slice, but I got the second slice just right.

A promising start.

Because of my over-enthusiastic soaking of the first piece, it was falling apart and there wasn't enough mix for the third piece. So I squeezed the first piece's egg juice back into the bowl. Because I'm insane. Then I used that egg mixture to soak the last piece of bread and got it just right.

Don't ask me for good ideas.

The next thing to do was to preheat the oven. You fry these, then bake them. The recipe said 2-3 minutes until golden brown. I don't think I fried them long enough, though it was at the right temperature, with the right amount of butter, in a nonstick skillet as was recommended, for the maximum amount of time.

Missing the crucial "brown" part of the equation.

I put them in the oven and let them cook for five minutes. I poked them open in a few places just to make sure that egg mixture really had cooked. It had. I put a little bit of butter and some maple syrup on top, then had a bite.

Moments before my hopes were dashed cruelly upon the rocks.

They were flavorless. Quite literally flavorless. I tried it unbuttered and unsyruped and there was zero flavor. With butter and syrup I could taste butter and syrup.

I'm going to try again tomorrow, but with my mom's recipe.

Wish me luck.