‘American’ French Toast for Breakfast

Saturday morning the 31st of March, 2012.

As I was hauling my body up out of bed I was thinking that I might go down to Maccas and get a bacon and egg McMuffin—without the cheese. Can’t stand the idea of cheese for breakfast, and also, I hate the highly salty taste of the plastic squares of ‘compounded’ cheese (as it is called) McDonalds use in their bacon and egg McMuffins. When it is melted into a burger it reminds me exactly of contact adhesive. And if you have ever tried to scrape it off because they ended up putting cheese in your burger even though you asked for no cheese and you didn’t find this out until you got home and saw the horrid yellow stuff leaking out the side of your burger, then it even seems to bond to your bacon and egg like contact adhesive.

Anyway . . . I have had Nutra Grain cereal for breakfast all week and was looking forward to a change this morning.

But the nearest Maccas is at least a 30 minute round trip.

So I started to lean towards the idea of scrambled eggs on toast—now that the nutrition experts are telling us we need to eat at least two eggs a week. But then I got a new idea. Recently someone pointed out to me how American french toast and Australian french toast are very different. While us Australians simply fry some bread in butter until it is golden brown and crispy, them there Americans dip the bread in beaten egg and then fry it.

So I decided to try American french toast for the first time in my almost 59 years on the planet.

After double checking that we had some bread—I am not here during the week so I generally have no idea what we do and don’t have available—I then beat up two eggs and added some pepper and salt. Got a pan hot. Drenched a couple of slices of bread in the whisked egg mix and dropped them in a buttered pan.

For anyone planning to try this I can tell you that two medium sized eggs make just about the perfect amount of beaten egg to do four slices of American french toast. Did for me anyway.

The first thing that sort of surprised me, but I guess after thinking about it that it probably should not have been a surprise, was that American french toast is not crispy like Australian french toast. When you take the golden brown ‘toasted’ egg coated bread out of the pan it is still very floppy and bread-like. It does not go crispy. It doesn’t go even the slightest bit crispy.

That was the first surprise.

The second surprise is the taste. I was kind of expecting it to taste very much like scrambled eggs on toast. After all I had basically made some scrambled eggs and then dipped bread into it and cooked it.

But the resulting American french toast does not taste anything like scrambled eggs. The taste is very much more like a pancake. And again, when you process this, taking bread, which is more or less flour+salt+water, and then adding beaten egg to this and cooking it, that sounds very much like the ingredients for pancakes; but the order has changed.

The taste is so much like pancakes that as I ate my slices of American french toast, and I only managed to eat three of them, I found myself looking for maple syrup or sweetened yogurt to put on them.

I am not sure I would bother with American french toast again, but as a one-time adventure it worked out okay.