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Learn how to make the perfect brioche French toast with chef Neil Kleinberg of Clinton Street Baking Company. Discover the restaurant secrets behind custardy French toast, from thick-cut brioche and balanced batter to caramelised bananas and rich maple butter for a delicious brunch recipe at home.
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00:00Hi, I'm Neil Kleinberg, chef owner of Clinton Street Baking Company and Restaurant, and today
00:08we're going to make the perfect brioche French toast. Clinton Street has been here almost 25
00:15years. We're just known for making the most delicious breakfast and brunch foods. The French
00:21toast is one of our top sellers. On the weekends, we could sell up to 50 orders a day. What makes
00:27the perfect French toast is a few components. The batter, the garnish, the maple butter, and
00:34I'm going to show you the most important part right now, which is our brioche bread.
00:42This is our brioche bread. It's like a white bread enriched with eggs and egg yolks and butter,
00:48and it makes it so golden and so tender and so beautiful, and that's what you're going
00:53to taste when you eat the French toast. And we like to slice it really nice and thick.
00:59Beautiful thick slices, two inches, three inches, however you like it. If you can't get brioche,
01:04challah is a nice stand-in. The difference between challah and brioche is challah is made with oil,
01:10and it makes it very soft, but brioche is made with full butter, and you can really taste the
01:15butter in that bread when you bake it and when you cook it. If you don't have brioche, you can't
01:20get challah. I would go with like a simple good quality white bread, a day-old French bread, but
01:26the ultimate is the brioche. Downstairs we have a full bakery where we make at least 80 loaves a
01:32week. The shape of the brioche is called the Pullman shape or a Pullman loaf, named after the
01:38famous Pullman train cars, and they come out like a big square with a little dome on the top. If you're
01:44making this at home, cut the bread a little thick. I'm talking an inch and a half to two inches thick.
01:49The thickness of the bread has a lot to do with how much batter is absorbed, and when you absorb
01:55a good amount of batter, you're absorbing all the flavor. If I cook this brioche too thin,
02:01you're not going to get any of the fluffiness, the texture, and the nuance as if you sliced it thick.
02:07This bread right out of the oven, it's very soft. You need to rest it a day so that you get a really nice
02:13firm texture in between inside. But once you dip it in the batter, if it's a day old, it just
02:22sucks up the batter and it makes it really really nice. Our bread is sliced and it's time to move on
02:27to the batter. The ratios are very important. The biggest mistake people make about the batter is
02:37too much milk, not enough egg. Too much egg, not enough milk. It's about the balance. We'll start
02:43with the eggs and the cream. We're using half and half because kebby cream, it's too rich. So we use
02:49half and half, which is half cream and half milk, which makes it a little lighter, a little easier
02:54to work with. Three or four eggs. So I would say the ratio is three parts half and half to one part
03:01egg. I'm going to just whisk this together and you're going to see the color change a little bit.
03:06It's a look and feel as well. Sometimes the milk and cream are a little richer, sometimes your eggs are
03:11a little larger. Then as you can see, it's starting to get a little golden in color. The consistency I'm
03:17looking for is the consistency of heavy cream and I'm making sure that the whites and the yolks are
03:23whisked in really nice. You can't really over mix this. The next thing I'm going to do is add a little
03:28bit of vanilla. We use pure 100% vanilla. Home cooks often skip the use of real vanilla extract.
03:35They'll use an imitation. I also like to add a little bit of vanilla paste. The vanilla paste is beautiful.
03:41It has specks of the vanilla bean in it and it makes the batter nice and speckled. You can really smell
03:49the beautiful vanilla bean flavor. This batter should be a little bit sweet. So I'm going to add
03:55maybe a half a cup of sugar. Then I'm going to add a nice pinch of cinnamon. You want that flavor to come
04:02out in the batter. Got a beautiful aroma. I'm going to use a pinch of salt. The salt pulls together the
04:09seasoning of the whole thing. And then this beautiful organic lemon oil. This is like a lemon extract made
04:18from organic lemons and also some orange oil. There's a lot of nice oils coming out of the orange peel.
04:25The citrus is adding the nuance, pulling the whole entire flavor profile together. And I'm constantly
04:31whisking it. It keeps the cinnamon integrated into the batter. I'm going to pour the batter gently.
04:37You see a little bit of cinnamon like straggling at the end. I'm just going to pour that batter right in there.
04:47When we go to dip the french toast. We're going to dip it in a square container like that.
04:55And then like that. See I'm not dipping it for very long but I'm dipping it enough. So the brioche
05:02is absorbing all of that beautiful batter. You could even see some of the cinnamon coming up to the top.
05:08It's nice and soaked. The same with this side. I'll let it drain off. You could actually see it getting
05:16porous in here. You could actually see the batter entering the middle of the bread. And then you'll
05:22actually feel the weight. It's soaked in the middle but it's not over soaked. You know how sometimes if you're
05:28making french toast at home and you don't drain it and you put it in your pan and you get that egg
05:33ring around. That's bad. And that comes from the batter itself. Not having too much egg in the batter
05:41and also draining it. So when that you go to the stove to cook it in your pan you're not going to
05:46have that excess ring coming out of the brioche. One more time here. You don't want to soak this too much.
05:53The brioche is a very light bread. You dip it and drain it and then you want to move to the stove.
06:02The first thing we're going to do is we're going to hit this griddle with some clarified butter.
06:07No milk solids in it so it's not going to burn. I have the griddle set at about 350. If you have
06:13something at home like a cast iron pan or a thickled griddle or an electric griddle that's great too.
06:19So we're going to take our dip brioche. We're going to put it right on the clarified butter
06:24and then we're going to hit it with a little more clarified butter in between just to get the
06:29nooks and crannies going. The clarified butter cooks it long enough, gets a crust around it without
06:35burning it. We're going to add a little bit of whole butter in between the french toast. A little knob
06:41there and a little knob there. This allows the french toast to get really caramelized on the outside.
06:48The milk solids from the butter are starting to brown. When you're making this at home you just
06:52don't want it to be too high of a flame. Medium high heat to start and then a little bit lower
06:59to finish. If it's too high of the flame the butter's going to burn before you get that nice
07:04color. We're getting a nice little bubbly outside. The grill is not too hot. We're going to peek a little
07:12bit. The eggs and butter in the bread helps with the browning process and as you can tell when I flip
07:20one you've got that beautiful golden brown color. You can even see the cinnamon speckled in there.
07:29So you can always
07:33check the bottom. And so we're going to flip this one. That's a beautiful color.
07:37You see that really nice ring around that edge of the brioche. From the time I put it on the griddle
07:45until I flipped it I would say two minutes. Maybe that's three minutes. This one it was a little
07:52light and maybe I flipped it a little early but this dish is very forgiving. The biggest mistake people
07:58make at home is they flip it too many times or they're not sure or they dig into this and then like
08:04oh my god. Now you do a little test. You see how it's kind of springing back to form? If it doesn't
08:10spring back to form that means it's a little raw inside. Remember there's raw eggs in the batter so
08:16you have to give it enough time to cook the eggs through. It's kind of like a custard and I like to
08:22shingle them to have a three-dimensional look and this brioche is perfect because of the thick slices you get a
08:28nice lime. I see my pan is really really nice and hot here. To make my caramelized bananas I'm going to
08:39take some brown sugar. I'm going to caramelize it in the pan. I'm going to add a nice spoon of butter.
08:48This is some sweet butter unsalted and while the brown sugar is caramelizing with the butter I'm going
08:54to add a little bit of cinnamon sugar. We want to take a ripe banana cut it in big thick chunks. You
09:00see it nice and smoky and caramelize the sugar the cinnamon and then we're going to add our bananas
09:06right to the top. We're swirling them around and tossing them in the caramel to get them nice and
09:12coated and then we're going to kind of put it off to the side. The bananas don't need to cook too much.
09:17Once that's started we're going to make our maple butter and we're basically just going to heat up
09:23a cup. There's no substitute for real maple syrup. The beauty of this sauce it doesn't take a lot of
09:29time just heat it on a low to medium heat. Add spoons of butter to this sauce while you're whisking it.
09:38It's basically like a french butter sauce where you're constantly whisking and you're constantly
09:45adding butter until it's dissolved. As I make this sauce the color gets lighter and lighter.
09:53From a dark amber to a light butterscotch kind of color. Our sauce is where I want it and we're
10:00going to garnish the french toast with some beautiful Texas pecans. This is just a small little non-stick
10:06pan and I just like to give them a little toast. It releases a lot of the oils and the flavors of
10:12the nuts. It gives it a nice crunchy top. You can toast these well in advance and then kind of toss them.
10:20One of the things that you don't want to do is burn them. Now I'd like to go and plate the final dish.
10:26So with the garnish here with our caramelized bananas we basically just want to put them on
10:31the dish naturally. You see how beautiful. Then we're going to put some of our toasted pecans over
10:37the top. We're going to pour some of our maple butter right out of the pitcher and then that last shake
10:43of the cinnamon sugar is like the most important thing for me. And here's our signature brioche
10:48french toast. To me this is one of my favorite bites. It is so soothing. It is so comforting.
10:54It's something you want to just eat on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee.
11:02The inside of the french toast is perfect. I see a little bit of moistness in here. I know the batter
11:08is cooked in the middle but it's still nice and soft. I can see the nooks and crannies of the actual
11:14brioche so I know it wasn't over soaked. Still firm yet spongy texture. I'm now tasting all of the
11:23little nuances and profiles of the flavors. I could taste and smell the aroma of the lemon and the
11:30orange coming out. I get a real nice deep flavor of the vanilla. It's not too sweet. It's just the
11:36balance of the savory, the butteriness of the bread. The bananas can really taste the banana. The nuttiness of
11:44the pecans. The cinnamon sugar at the very end gives it a nice little sandy texture. All of those
11:50things make the perfect french toast. It's all about experience. It's all about your personal taste.
11:56How you like things and how you know your friends and family like it when you make it.
12:04If I had to choose between love and butter, I would choose butter.
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