You've Been Making French Toast Wrong Your Whole Life
See how Chef Marc Murphy makes French toast the star of the show.
Michael Moriatis
Warning: If your idea of French toast is cute little manageable slices of white bread you might want to stop reading now. Recently, Chef Marc Murphy's stopped by Guy's ranch to give French toast the upgrade it deserves on Guys Ranch Kitchen. "In France, the pain perdu is a dessert in a very fancy restaurant, and it was absolutely beautiful, and I fell in love with it," says Marc. "Pain perdu means lost bread. It's bread that will be lost if you're not going to actually use it because it's bread that's stale, and it's overdone. You use any old crusty bread."
For his dish at the ranch he uses gigantic three-inch slices of filone, a crusty Italian bread, and soaks them overnight in a mixture of egg, cream, sugar and cognac. "I'm cutting such a big piece of it, for all of that liquid to get althe way into the bread, it's going to take a long time. And once that's soaked up like a sponge, then you're ready to go," says Marc. He then sears the pieces on each side in a cast iron pan to caramelize them and then pops them in the oven so that they cook through. "It almost becomes like a custard on the inside, it souffles up."
Marc's French Toast easily won best dish of the afternoon. "It feels like creme brulee," said Justin Warner. Guy agreed, "It's creme brulee french toast."
Watch Guy's Ranch Kitchen Saturdays at 12:30|11:30c.
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