Kitchen Hip Tip: Toast Your Challah When Making French Toast

We've been eating a lot of French toast on the weekends, ever since we enrolled our small child in a Temple preschool. To support their fundraising efforts, we subscribed to their challah-a-week program, which means we have a constant supply of the ideal French toast bread, and no reason not to fry it up for breakfast on Sunday mornings.

THe thing is, since we get the bread on Friday, it's not quite stale by Sunday. And stale, dry bread soaks up the custard and vanilla and other French toast yumminess better than moist, fresh bread. To compensate, for weeks, I dried out slices of the bread in a low oven, just letting it bake until it was firm and dry but not at all golden. It took its sweet time but then why hurry on a Sunday?

One week, I had reason to want to hurry (you know, a screaming 3 year old demanding her French toast NOW, that sort of hurry). So instead of slowly and patiently drying out the bread, I quickly toasted it under the boiler until it was deeply bronzed on both sides.

And it made the best French toast ever. This is not surprising. Browned, caramelized sugars, whether we are talking about the sugar in challah or the natural sugar in vegetables or meats, add a deep flavor to foods. And it really made my French toast even tastier -- richer, slightly nutty, while still remaining custardy and tender in the center. And the best part, you can do it FAST when a certain little someone wants their breakfast NOW.

Here's what you do: Toast the challah slices (or any bread slices, this works with all breads) under the broiler until golden. Mix up a custard. You can use milk, almond milk, coconut milk, whatever you've got and your diet allows, along with eggs, a pinch of salt, a little honey, some vanilla extract or orange blossom water, and nutmeg (the nutmeg is essential).

Let the bread soak in the custard until it absorbs it - at least 10 minutes or longer if you can bide for time by feeding your small child some maple syrup off a spoon. After all, that's what she really wants.

Then fry up the slices in butter in a skillet. I let my husband do that bit. He's a more patient fryer than I am. I get antsy and multitask and end up burning everything. He has the focus to stand there and wait for the slices to take on the perfect degree of browness before flipping - without giving into the pull of the full dishwasher  (he fries, I empty).

You can also  bake your French toast slices. But takes much longer. And aren't you hungry yet?