Savory French Toast Recipes | The Nibble Webzine Of Food Adventures

TIP OF THE DAY: Savory French Toast

June 7, 2015 at 8:13 am · Filed under Breakfast & Brunch, Cheese-Yogurt-Dairy, Father's Day, Recipes

Saturday was always “French Toast for breakfast day” in our family. It was always sweet, with real maple syrup and fresh fruit.

So when we came across this recipe for savory French Toast from Castello Cheese (which used its Aged Havarti in the recipe), we picked the following Saturday (yesterday) to give it a try.

The result: a nifty breakfast option for those who don’t particularly like syrup or other sweet toppings, and a change of pace for those who do. It evokes a breakfast grilled cheese sandwich on a soft, eggy base of pan-fried bread, rather than on crisp toasted bread.

It’s a nice change of pace. Just as you can vary the toppings on French Toast, you can use different savory toppings.

For those of you who remember Creamed Chipped Beef On Toast, you can make a French Toast version. Use leftover beef or jerky to replace the tomato and cheese in the recipe below. No beef? Check the fridge: You can adapt just about any savory leftovers.

Savory French Toast with cheese and tomatoes. Photo courtesy Castello Cheese.

Test out the recipe now: It may be just what you’re looking for for Father’s Day.

Prep time is 40 minutes. For prettier color, look for heirloom cherry tomatoes or a mix of red, orange and yellow varieties.

As you can see in the photo, the Castello chef used a three-inch round cookie cutter to cut the bread in circles after it comes out of the pan. We’re not so elegant; and besides, we don’t want to give up that cut-away French toast.

RECIPE: SAVORY FRENCH TOAST

Ingredients For 6 Servings

For The Tomato Topping

3 cups cherry tomatoes, cut in half

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 teaspoon chopped fresh oregano

1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

Salt and pepper to taste

For The French Toast

2 cups milk

2 eggs

¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese (substitute Asiago or Pecorino Romano)

Salt and pepper to taste

6 1½-inch thick slices brioche, egg bread or jalapeño Italian bread

2 ounces aged Havarti, shaved (substitute Jack, aged Gouda, Tilsit or other shaveable cheese)

A Monte Cristo sandwich is ham and Gruyère on French Toast. Photo courtesy Kikkoman.

Variations

Blue cheese and sliced apples

Feta and kalamata olives with dill or oregano

Smoked salmon, caviar and crème fraîche

Preparation

1. PREPARE the tomatoes: Sauté the tomatoes in the olive oil over medium high heat. Add the oregano and vinegar and cook until softened, about 3 minutes. Season the mixture with salt and pepper and set aside, keeping warm until ready to serve.

2. MAKE the French Toast: Whisk the milk, egg, Parmesan, salt and pepper in a shallow pan. Dip the bread into the milk mixture and pan fry it in a hot non-stick pan for 3 minutes per side.

3. TRANSFER the bread onto serving plates and top with the tomato mixture. Shave the cheese over the tomatoes. Serve immediately.

THE HISTORY OF FRENCH TOAST

The dish known in America as French toast has roots at least as far back as ancient Rome, where it was a sweet dish. In fact, pain perdu (lost bread), the current French name for the dish, was once called pain à la romaine, or Roman bread.

While the story evolved that French Toast was a food of the poor, trying to scrape together a meal from stale bread, recipes from ancient and medieval times denote that it was fare for wealthy people.

Recipes used white bread, a luxury, with the crusts cut off. Poor people ate brown bread, much cheaper because the wheat endosperm did not have to be milled and painstakingly hand-sifted through screens to create white flour.

Costly ingredients such as spices (cinnamon, cloves, mace and nutmeg), sugar and almond milk are found in numerous recipes.

The cooked bread was topped with costly honey or sugar.

And cookbooks themselves were the province of the privileged: Only wealthy people and clergy learned to read.

THE MONTE CRISTO SANDWICH

More recently, French toast has evolved into a savory sandwich, the Monte Cristo. It is an evolution of the croque-monsieur, a crustless sandwich of ham and Gruyère cheese, buttered and lightly browned on both sides in a skillet or under a broiler.

The croque-monsieur was invented in Paris in 1910. A variation with a baked egg on top is called a croque-madame. Neither sandwich was battered, like French toast.

The Monte Cristo sandwich, a triple-decker sandwich, battered and pan-fried, was invented at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. According to the L.A. Times, the first recipe in print is in the Brown Derby Cookbook, published in 1949.

Here’s the recipe so you can try it for lunch—although probably not on the same day you have French Toast for breakfast.

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