On Cooking: Making Really Soggy Cinnamon French Toast

All the stereotyping I'd absorbed from Hollywood has made me think putting "French" before a noun automatically makes it sound haute -- or snooty. Take your pick (exception: French fries).

Beware.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

But French toast is really just bread dunked into a mixture made up of beaten eggs and et ceteras -- milk, sugar, vanilla, hbzmdrohmaesnfgjmyrkldiy -- and fried. At least to my novice feelers, it's a simple, easy way to spice up regular toast, and a good way to start cooking -- toasting bread was probably the first thing about food preparation you learned how to do.

Then again, my closest experience of French toast as far as I could remember was the one time, long ago, of me frying buttered bread right after my sunny-side-up egg to save me a trip to the toaster. What can I say? French toast over here isn't the staple rice is, and my house is not a foodie place.

Plus, it's versatile -- it can be sweet or salty, and has probably more recipes and preferences over the way it's prepared than Saruman's whole Uruk-hai army. With or without sugar in the egg mixture, with or without powdered sugar sprinkled on top, with or without maple syrup, with or without milk, soggy or crispy, fried with butter or oil, and how many eggs? Seriously. It's a scary place out there.


SO, HOW DID I DO IT?

Since I'm operating on the Cooking Methods > Recipes thingie I've been yapping away about recently: the best and most convenient way to start discovering what I like is to experiment with what I already have in the house. No fretting about ingredients I don't have on hand right now and waiting for supermarket day or popping out to the nearest 7-11. Go shop in your own backyard and what you find can surprise you.

Like cinnamon. (What average Filipino household stocks cinnamon?)

Oooh. Ciiinnamon. (Oh, who am I kidding? I just needed pictures.)
Image courtesy of Grant Cochrane at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

And the rest:

The bread: two slices of Gardenia Whole Wheat from the fridge.

Eggs: two, white, and the number I decided on just because.

Sugar: one tablespoon, see above for why I decided on just the one.

Butter: for the frying, enough to coat the bottom of the pan. Because oil is mundane and boring and come on, it's butter.

Milk: Nestle, one of those little tetra paks the size of those Chuckie single-serves that come with straws at the back. You know, the ones your juice or Chocolait came in that your mommy or yaya packed into your lunchbox when you were eight. I poured some into a bowl and drank the rest.

The cinnamon? Powdered and in a bottle, of course, and I didn't measure. Shook the bottle once at the bowl. Maybe it was a tablespoon. No pinches for me, sorry. If the eggmilksugar-zilla turned out bland the cinnamon just might save it, right?

And since my novice logic thought less exposure = bland, I'd practically marinated the bread. That made it come out soggy -- which wasn't bad news to me. I like my toast so minimally crispy the bread's only started browning when I take it out of the toaster. That was how I knew when to take the toast out of the pan.

Voila:

(Why -- why -- do I dare blight this blog -- the intarnetz! -- with crappy pictures? What do you think I am, one of 'em foetoe-shop geeks?)

Remember the Pinterest link above? You already got your pretty French toast pictures.


VERDICT:

Nothing surprising. Soggy, no crunch at all, tasted like cinnamon.

For a first attempt by a noob so nooby she'd never even eaten what she was trying to cook, it was pretty good, I tell you.

Sheer dumb luck was at work there, somewhere.

Oh, I'll be trying other versions. Less milk and no marinating this time, for example, to give it a little crispiness.