How NYC’s Best French Toast is Made

[bright music]

Hi, I am Neil Kleinberg,

chef, owner of Clinton Street Baking Company and Restaurant,

and today we're gonna make

the perfect brioche French toast.

Clinton Street has been here almost 25 years.

We're just known for making

the most delicious breakfast and brunch foods.

The French toast is one of our top sellers.

On the weekends, we could sell up to 50 orders a day.

What makes the perfect French toast is a few components,

the batter, the garnish, and the maple butter.

And I'm gonna show you the most important part right now,

which is our brioche bread.

[upbeat music]

This is our brioche bread.

It's like a white bread enriched with eggs,

and egg yolks and butter,

and it makes it so golden, and so tender and so beautiful.

And that's what you're gonna taste

when you eat the French toast.

And we like to slice it really nice and thick.

Beautiful thick slices, two inches, three inches,

however you like it.

If you can't get brioche, challah's a nice stand-in.

The difference between challah and brioche

is challah is made with oil and it makes it very soft,

but brioche is made with full butter,

and you can really taste the butter in that bread

when you bake it and when you cook it.

If you don't have brioche, you can't get challah,

I would go with, like, a simple, good quality white bread,

a day old French bread, but the ultimate is the brioche.

Downstairs we have a full bakery

where we make at least 80 loaves a week.

The shape of the brioche

is called the Pullman shape, or a Pullman loaf,

named after the famous Pullman train cars.

And they come out like a big square

with a little dome on the top.

If you're making this at home, cut the bread a little thick.

I'm talking an inch and a half to two inches thick.

The thickness of the bread has a lot to do

with how much batter is absorbed,

and when you absorb a good amount of batter,

you're absorbing all the flavor.

If I cook this brioche too thin,

you're not gonna get any of the fluffiness, the texture,

and the nuance as if you'd sliced it thick.

This bread right out of the oven, it's very soft.

You need to rest it a day so that you get

a really nice firm texture in between inside.

But once you dip it in the batter, if it's a day old,

it just sucks up the batter

and it makes it really, really nice.

Our bread is sliced and it's time to move on to the batter.

[upbeat music]

The ratios are very important.

The biggest mistake people make about the batter

is too much milk, not enough egg.

Too much egg, not enough milk.

It's about the balance.

We'll start with the eggs and the cream.

We're using half and half

because heavy cream, it's too rich.

So we use half and half, which is half cream and half milk,

which makes it a little lighter,

a little easier to work with.

Three or four eggs.

So I would say the ratio is three parts half and half

to one part egg.

I'm gonna just whisk this together

and you're gonna see the color change a little bit.

It's a look and feel as well.

Sometimes the milk and cream are a little richer,

sometimes your eggs are a little larger than,

as you can see, it's starting

to get a little golden in color.

The consistency I'm looking for

is the consistency of heavy cream,

and I'm making sure that the whites and the yolks

are whisked in really nice.

You can't really overmix this.

The next thing I'm gonna do is add a little bit of vanilla.

We use pure, a hundred percent vanilla.

Home cooks often skip the use of real vanilla extract.

They'll use an imitation.

I also like to add a little bit of vanilla paste.

The vanilla paste is beautiful.

It has specks of the vanilla bean in it,

and it makes the batter nice and speckled.

You can really smell the beautiful vanilla bean flavor.

This batter should be a little bit sweet,

so I'm gonna add maybe a half a cup of sugar.

Then I'm gonna add a nice pinch of cinnamon.

You want that flavor to come out in the batter.

Got a beautiful aroma.

I'm gonna use a pinch of salt.

The salt pulls together the seasoning of the whole thing,

and then this beautiful organic lemon oil.

This is like a lemon extract made from organic lemons

and also some orange oil.

There's a lot of nice oils coming out of the orange peel.

The citrus is adding the nuance,

pulling the whole entire flavor profile together.

And I'm constantly whisking it.

It keeps the cinnamon integrated into the batter.

I'm gonna pour the batter gently.

You see a little bit of cinnamon milk

like straggling at the end.

I'm just going to pour that batter right in there.

[bright music]

When we go to dip the french toast,

we're gonna dip it in a square container like that,

and then like that.

See, I'm not dipping it for very long,

but I'm dipping it enough

so the brioche is absorbing all of that beautiful batter.

You could even see some of the cinnamon

coming up to the top.

It's nice and soaked.

The same with this side.

I'll let it drain off.

You could actually see it getting porous in here.

You could actually see the batter

entering the middle of the bread,

and then you'll actually feel the weight.

It's soaked in the middle, but it's not over soaked.

You know how sometimes

if you're making french toast at home,

and you don't drain it, and you put it in your pan

and you get that egg ring around, that's bad.

And that comes from the batter itself,

not having too much egg in the batter

and also draining it so when that you go to the stove

to cook it in your pan,

you're not gonna have that excess ring

coming out of the brioche.

One more time here.

You don't wanna soak this too much.

The brioche is a very light bread.

You dip it and drain it,

and then you wanna move to the stove.

The first thing we're gonna do

is we're gonna hit this griddle with some clarified butter,

no milk solids in it, so it's not gonna burn.

I have the griddle set at about 350.

If you have something at home like a cast iron pan

or a thick old griddle or an electric griddle,

that's great too.

So we're gonna take our dipped brioche.

We're gonna put it right on the clarified butter,

and then we're gonna hit it

with a little more clarified butter in between

just to get the nooks and crannies going.

The clarified butter cooks it long enough,

gets a crust around it without burning it.

We're gonna add a little bit of whole butter

in between the french toast, a little knob there,

and a little knob there.

This allows the french toast

to get really caramelized on the outside.

The milk solids from the butter are starting to brown.

When you're making this at home,

you just don't want it to be too high of a flame.

Medium high heat to start,

and then a little bit lower to finish.

If it's too high of a flame, the butter's gonna burn

before you get that nice color.

We're getting a nice little bubbly outside.

The grill is not too hot.

We're gonna peek a little bit.

The eggs and butter in the bread

helps with the browning process.

And as you can tell when I flip one,

you've got that beautiful golden brown color.

You can even see the cinnamon speckled in there,

so you can always check the bottom.

And so we're gonna flip this one, that's a beautiful color.

You see that really nice ring

around that edge of the brioche?

From the time I put it on the griddle until I flipped it,

I would say two minutes.

Maybe that's three minutes.

This one, it was a little light,

and maybe I flipped it a little early,

but this dish is very forgiving.

The biggest mistake people make at home

is they flip it too many times or they're not sure,

or they dig into this and they're like, oh my God.

I do a little test.

You see how it's kind of springing back to form.

If it doesn't spring back to form,

that means it's a little raw inside.

Remember, there's raw eggs in the batter,

so you have to give it enough time to cook the eggs through.

It's kind of like a custard.

And I like to shingle them to have a three dimensional look.

And this brioche is perfect because of the thick slices,

you get a nice lean.

[upbeat music]

I see my pan is really, really nice and hot here.

To make my caramelized bananas,

I'm gonna take some brown sugar.

I'm gonna caramelize it in the pan.

I'm gonna add a nice spoon of butter.

This is some sweet butter, unsalted.

And while the brown sugar is caramelizing with the butter,

I'm gonna add a little bit of cinnamon sugar.

We wanna take a ripe banana, cut it in big thick chunks.

You see it nice and smokey

and caramelize the sugar, the cinnamon,

and then we're gonna add our bananas right to the top.

We're swirling them around and tossing them in the caramel

to get them nice and coated.

And then we're gonna kind of put it off to the side.

The bananas don't need to cook too much.

Once that's started, we're gonna make our maple butter

and we're basically just going to heat up a cup.

There's no substitute for real maple syrup.

The beauty of this sauce, it doesn't take a lot of time.

Just heat it on a low to medium heat.

Add spoons of butter to this sauce while you're whisking it.

It's basically like a French butter sauce

where you're constantly whisking

and you're constantly adding butter until it's dissolved.

As I make this sauce, the color gets lighter and lighter

from a dark amber to a light butterscotch kind of color.

Our sauce is where I want it,

and we're gonna garnish the French toast

with some beautiful Texas pecans.

This is just a small little non-stick pan,

and I just like to give them a little toast.

It releases a lot of the oils and the flavors of the nuts.

It gives it a nice crunchy top.

You can toast these well in advance

and then kind of toss them.

One of the things that you don't wanna do is burn them.

Now, I'd like to go and plate the final dish.

So with the garnish here with our caramelized bananas,

we basically just wanna put them on the dish naturally.

You see how beautiful.

Then we're gonna put some of our toasted pecans

over the top.

We're gonna pour some of our maple butter

right out of the pitcher.

And then that last shake of the cinnamon sugar

is like the most important thing for me.

And here's our signature brioche French toast.

To me, this is one of my favorite bites.

It is so soothing, it is so comforting.

It's something you wanna just eat on a Sunday morning

with a cup of coffee.

The inside of the French toast is perfect.

I see a little bit of moistness in here.

I know the batter is cooked in the middle,

but it's still nice and soft.

I can see the nooks and crannies of the actual brioche,

so I know it wasn't over soaked.

Still firm yet spongy texture.

I'm now tasting all of the little nuances

and profiles of the flavors.

I could taste and smell the aroma of the lemon

and the orange coming out.

I get a real nice deep flavor of the vanilla.

It's not too sweet.

It's just the balance of the savory.

The butteriness of the bread.

The bananas, can really taste the banana,

the nuttiness of the pecans.

The cinnamon sugar at the very end,

gives it a nice little sandy texture.

All of those things make a perfect french toast.

It's all about experience,

it's all about your personal taste, how you like things,

and how you know your friends and family like it

when you make it.

If I had to choose between love and butter,

I would choose butter. [Neil laughs]