Audra Lowe: If you have some time off this holiday season, how about treating your family to a little branch and today’s better bites executive chef Brian Ellis of The Smith is showing us how to make a delicious vanilla bean French toast. Sound so good.
Brian Ellis: This French toast is kind of like a play on a crumbled egg. It’s a butter using brioche bread, cinnamon, vanilla, pretty traditional about we draw our own—we have brioche bread which is a butter bread, you could hala at home if you can’t get it at your local bakery. We decided to use brioche because it’s super soft. We’re going to start up with some egg yolks, 10 egg yolks, a cup of milk and a cup of heavy cream. If you are scared of heavy cream, soy milk is a great substitute for that. You could also use skim milk. We use heavy cream because it really just sticks on the bread, some cinnamon, vanilla and some sugar, it’s about a ¼ of cup of sugar and all it’s going to cook in together.
I’m going to pour this directly over the bread, it’s going to act like a sponge. What the egg does is when it sticks to it and you put it on your griddle or whatever you’re going to cook it with, the egg tends to kick on and kind of—a little bit. So, it seems like a lot of egg yolk but it’s not. Just soak in it, take your time. A lot of times at home you might want to rush it and it doesn’t penetrate the center of the bread. And then we’re ready to cook. I use butter. At home if you want to use a less calorie item, you could use a spray, oil would work too. And then on the pan you wanted to be not smoking hot but you would want I’d say a medium heat. It should be cooked through but very moist kind of like a custard. It’s beautiful golden brown on both sides like I said about a minute aside and then right the oven 375-degree oven. About five minutes until it sets and you’re ready to go.
So now, we’re going to plate it up to you as we do at The Smith. What we do is we’re just going to cool—we’ll take a maple syrup from—and we take some butter and we’re going to make a compound butter by just simply adding a maple syrup. It’s about two part butter to one part syrup, stir it up. You also have caramelized bananas so we’re going to top the French toast with that as well, nice generous proportion as well as some powdered sugar.
Audra Lowe: And Smith is located in New York’s east village. If you want to make your own French toast, the recipe is on our website, BetterTV.com, just click on Better Recipes.
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