What's the Best Bread for French Toast?

What's the best bread for French toast? To be honest, this is not the most relevant question. At least in my home, French toast is made with whatever kind of bread we have on hand, whether it's sliced bread from the suparmarket, some leftover baguette from last night's cheeseboard, the stale pannettone someone is bound to gift me each year (panettone makes excellent French toast), or the end of loaf of croissant bread from Temple Pastries (this makes even better French toast)

Growing up, French toast was almost always the the same pre-sliced, Wonderbread-style, soft, slightly sweet, really squishy sandwich bread she'd used to make our peanut butter and banana sandwiches (sometimes with honey) or Fluffernutters. It wasn't a question of choice, it was just the default. We rarely had other styles of bread at home.

If we were lucky, my grandmother would pick have some extra slices of Japanese shokupan or cream-pan from the Japanese-French bakery in Fort Lee.

The exact type of bread is not typically a choice, but how you treat the bread is.

There are four basic ways to treat bread for french toast, but before we get to them, a quick note on drying vs. staling, as they aren't the same thing!

Drying is when moisture is removed from the bread. Fresh bread that has been toasted in the toaster oven will still taste nice and fresh, but a significant amount of its moisture will have been lost, giving it a dryer texture.

Staling is when the starch in the bread retrogrades. In freshly baked bread, the starch is soft, squishy, and malleable. As bread cools and rests, the starch retrogrades, re-forming a stiff crystalline structure and thus stiffening the bread. (This process happens faster in the fridge but can be completely halted in the freezer.) Stale bread will be stiffer and harder to eat without necessarily being more dry. Re-heating starch can cause it to re-gelatinize to a dgree. That's why stale bread can be refreshed in the oven to greater or lesser degrees of success.

With that out of the way, here are the four options for a slice of bread:

• Fresh, as-is: This is bread that is neither stale nor dry, straight from the loaf or bag.
• Dried but not stale: This is fresh bread that's been baked in a low temperature oven until a good amount of its moisture ahs been steamed off. Think reallly really blond toast.
• Stale but not dry: This is bread that has been allowed to sit overnight or for a few nights in a moisture-proof barrier (like a plastic bag). It still contains most of its initial moisture content, but its starch has retrograded and recrystallized, turning it from soft and supple to firm and... stale.
• Stale and dry: This is sliced bread that has been allowed to sit overnight outside of packaging so that it both dries and stales.

In the testing I did for this video, I tested fresh bread, dried bread, and stale and dry bread (I skipped stale but not dry).

The results were... not particularly compelling. Between stale and dry and dried alone there was not a huge difference. If you remember to leave your bread out the night before or have bread that's already stale and dry, use it. If you only have fresh toast, dry it out in a low oven for 15-20 minutes before using it.

That is, if you like your French toast firm enough to hold its shape (but still custardy and rich). If you like your French toast even softer and more custardy, go ahead and use fresh bread. It works just fine.

For the custard mixture, I use a combination of buttermilk (which I prefer to regular milk for its tang—regular milk works fine if it's what you got, as does half and half or cream), melted butter, and eggs with a pinch of salt and a dash of spices (I use poudre douce from World Spice, and excellent spice shop in Pike Place. The blend contains mostly cinnamon and ginger with a hint of allspice and brown sugar.

I like to sweeten my custard with brown sugar. In other parts of the world, the custard mixture for french toast may be completely unsweetened. But here, we like the custard sweet to begin with, and we serve it with maple syrup in case it wasn't sweet enough. (My mom used to serve it with peanut butter. Did your mom ever do that?)

For some extra texture and flavor, I like to sprinkle a bit of sugar on top of the toast in the skillet before flipping it. This is a trick I learned from my friend Daniel Gritzer when we were working on his recipe for French toast over on Serious eats:

Really Good French Toast

Every recipe I publish here is personally tested, tasted, and approved.

What I like about this recipe: The custard mixtre

YIELD:

Serves 4

ACTIVE TIME:

15 minutes

TOTAL TIME:

15 minutes

Notes: You can use any kind of bread, stale or fresh, dried or not. The dryer it is, the firmer the finished toast will be. To dry fresh bread slices, place them directly on the rack of an even set to 175- to 200°F for 15 to 20 minutes before proceeding. Finished french toast can be stored on a rack set on a rimmed baking in the same warm oven while you cook subsequent batches.

Use as much butter as you'd like in the pan. The more butter, the crisper the toast will get.

Ingredients:

• 1 cups (240ml) whole milk or buttermilk
• 4 large eggs
• 4 tablespoons brown sugar (about 50g), plus more for sprinkling
• Pinch kosher salt
• Pinch of ground warm spices as desired (such as cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, or allspice)
• 6 tablespoons (85g) unsalted butter, plus more as needed
• 1 teaspoon (5ml) vanilla extract
• 6 to 8 slices of bread (depending on how hungry you are and how absorbent the bread is)
• Maple syrup, for serving

Procedure:

1. Combine the buttermilk, eggs, sugar, salt, spices, and vanilla in a large bowl and whisk to combine. Melt the butter in a large non-stick, carbon steel, or cast iron skillet over medium heat until full melted. Pour about half of it into the bowl with the other custard ingredients and whisk to combine. Transfer mixture to a wide, shallow bowl big enough to fully dip a slice of bread in it.

2. Return the skillet to medium heat. Working one slice at a time, soak the bread in the custard mixture, letting it sit for a moment on each side for the custard to absorb. Transfer to the skillet, adding as many slices as you can fit in a single layer.

2. Sprinkle the top side of the french toast with a little sugar. When the bottom is browned and lightly charred in spots, carefully flip and cook the second side the same way. Transfer coked french toast to a wire rack set in rimmed baking sheet and transfer to the warm oven to hold while you cook the remaining batches.