For the Ultimate French Toast You Only Need a 1-Ingredient Upgrade
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When I was young, French toast was my go-to breakfast-in-bed dish to make for my mom on her birthday and Mother’s Day. I would cut each slice in half diagonally, then shingle the triangles in a symmetrical arrangement on the plate before blanketing the toast with a cascade of powdered sugar. I thought it was so fancy and special — a dish that’s rich, comforting, and simultaneously hearty and delicate. In short, French toast clearly communicates love.
Fast-forward to my impoverished college days. I leaned on French toast when funds were low and homesickness weighed heavy. This simple, inexpensive dish offered me a way to feel comforted and nurtured, a bit of loving nostalgia on the plate. I’ve since made French toast many times for my own kids, trying new approaches, hacks, and techniques to improve upon the basic egg-milk-sandwich bread version I typically lean on. I’ve never landed on a method I’d consider the best, so I was thrilled to tackle this assignment of systematically testing several variations on this beloved dish to crown a definitive winner. And in the process, I learned a lot.
For a creamy-custardy interior, crisp exterior, and by far the richest flavor, making French toast with heavy cream in the custard took top place.
A Few Notes on Methodology
The bread: For all of my testing, I used Sara Lee Artesano bread. These loaves offer thick, sturdy slices and a neutral flavor as the starting point.
The master recipe: Almost all of my tests began with the same starting point. I used 1/2 loaf of bread, soaking the slices in a whisked-together custard mixture of 3 eggs, 6 tablespoons whole milk, 2 tablespoons granulated sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon, and 1/8 teaspoon kosher salt. I cooked the soaked bread in a nonstick skillet coated with melted butter over medium heat. I would tweak this master recipe for each method I tested (using heavy cream in place of milk, for example); all of these tweaks are specified below.
The testing: There were three tiers of tests for this showdown. Tier 1 was to determine if fresh bread or dried bread worked best. From there, I used the winner of my Tier 1 test for the majority of the testing. Finally, there was a Tier 3 test: taking the overall winning method and cooking it in olive oil instead of butter.
My ratings: I rated each method on a scale of 1 to 10, the latter being reserved for absolute perfection. The criteria I used for evaluating each method were flavor and texture predominantly, with ease or difficulty of the method factoring in a minor way.
Method #1: Oven-Dried Bread
Rating: 3/10
About this method: As mentioned above, I started with a test to determine if French toast is best made with fresh bread or dried bread. For this test, I first arranged the bread slices on a sheet pan and dried them out in a 200°F oven; this took about 35 minutes, and I flipped the bread over at the halfway point.
Results: The dried-out bread was reluctant to soak up the custard mixture; it took more than 5 minutes for the bread to even start absorbing the liquid. Once cooked, the French toast was firmer and drier overall. The custard did not seem to penetrate the bread as fully, so the center of each piece felt basically like regular toast. The extra step, time, and effort did not prove to be worth it. A thick-sliced bread like the one I used (specified above) is already firmer and heartier than regular sandwich bread, so there’s no need to dry it out.
Method #2: Fresh Bread
Rating: 9/10
About this method: For the fresh bread test, I simply pulled slices out of the bread bag and proceeded with the master recipe detailed above in my methodology notes.
Results: Fresh bread won this test by a landslide. Fresh bread easily soaked up the custard mixture and cooked to a classic French toast texture: crisp on the outside, lusciously creamy and custardy on the inside. With these results in hand, I used Fresh bread for almost all of the Tier 2 and Tier 3 testing.
Method #3: No Eggs
Rating: 4/10
About this method: For this technique, I used fresh bread and replaced the 3 eggs in the master recipe with a single-serve cup of plain yogurt; I used a 5.3-ounce container of Fage plain whole-milk Greek yogurt.
Results: The custard mixture was very creamy and quite thick, and the bread didn’t want to absorb it; I ended up lightly rubbing the custard across the surface of the bread to get it to evenly soak in. As I cooked the French toast, the bread behaved oddly in the pan. It was limp, soggy, and seemed oily, and because it was so floppy, it was hard to turn over. The toast kept sticking to the pan as well. Although the exterior was mostly crispy, it cooked unevenly with some parts remaining undercooked. Inside, the bread was doughy and wet.
Method #4: No Custard
Rating: 7/10
About this method: This method took top honors in our French toast recipe showdown. It was popularized by famed chef Eric Ripert, and the details of the technique are explained in our showdown and his Instagram video. Here’s the gist: You take slices of “old bread” (and for this, I used dried-out bread per the recipe’s instructions), and instead of dipping them in an egg-milk custard, you soak them in milk, then spoon beaten egg and granulated sugar over the top of each slice. You place the bread in a pan with melted butter, sugared side down, and then spoon beaten egg and sugar on the other side. You cook the French toast until it’s browned and crisp on both sides.
Results: Here’s what I loved about this technique: that bruléed crust that’s formed by having sugar on the exterior. When cooked in butter, the sugar melts and caramelizes, giving you a delicious burnt-sugar flavor and crispy texture. But soaking the bread in milk first (as opposed to soaking it in egg-milk custard), and then spooning egg on the outside of each bread slice had this effect: The center of the bread seemed soggy (it was milk-soaked bread, after all), a texture that was sealed in by the eggy-caramelized sugar exterior. The interior wasn’t creamy-custardy; it leaned more wet-bread texture.
Method #5: Flour in Custard
Rating: 8/10
About this method: This is a technique that we’ve touted before in a recipe review. To test it, I simply added 2 tablespoons of flour to the custard mixture in the master recipe and used fresh bread for the test. (Tip: To ensure that you don’t end up with lumps of flour in the custard, whisk it with the milk until smooth first before adding the other ingredients.)
Results: The custard absorbed easily and fully into the bread. The cooked French toast had an almost paper-thin crispy exterior shell that was irresistible and that kept the interior creamy, custardy, and fluffy. Somehow, the flavor in the finished dish seemed eggier than other methods, slightly masking the sweetness of the sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon. But the texture was fantastic.
Method #6: Heavy Cream in Custard
Rating: 10/10
About this method: For this test, I used fresh bread and simply replaced the 6 tablespoons of milk in the master recipe with an equal amount of heavy cream.
Results: The whisked-together custard was thick and creamy, and it soaked into the bread slices easily and evenly. The cooked French toast was a little crispy on the outside, and the interior texture was rich and creamy while somehow simultaneously sturdy and slightly dense (in a good way, meaning it wasn’t wet or soggy). This French toast was the fluffiest of all, with an irresistible soufflé-like texture. And the butter it was cooked in gave the French toast an ultra creamy flavor packed with milky deliciousness.
Method #7: Olive Oil
Rating: 7.5/10
About this method: For this final test, I took the winning method (heavy cream in custard) and cooked the French toast in olive oil instead of butter. I used an everyday extra-virgin oil, one that wasn’t too peppery or overly fruity.
Results: The oil cooked the toast very evenly, giving it a uniform crispy exterior. But even with a moderately intense oil, the peppery-fruity olive oil flavor was too strong, overpowering the sweet vanilla-cinnamon notes of the French toast. I overwhelmingly prefer the milky richness of butter.
Overall Key Takeaways
Skip drying out the bread. I was happy to discover that drying out the bread first had no real advantages — if you use the right bread to start with, there’s no need to spend extra time on that step.
Use an enriched custard. Soaking fresh bread in an enriched custard (either boosted with flour or heavy cream) delivered outstanding results of crisp-on-the-outside, fluffy-custardy-on-the-inside French toast.
A little sprinkle of sugar goes a long way. Although the deconstructed method wasn’t the winner, I am definitely stealing part of the technique going forward. I cannot wait to make the winning heavy cream version with a sprinkling of sugar on the outside of the soaked bread before cooking it in melted butter. Rich, creamy flavor with a bruléed exterior? Yes, please!
Further Reading
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