Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Television

♪ ♪ - You know, everybody's wrong about French toast.

You think it's white, sliced supermarket bread soaked in milk and eggs, a little sugar, and then you throw it in a skillet or griddle.

It turns out this is one of those recipes where if you pay attention, you can make much better French toast.

Thicker slices, you soak for maybe ten or 15 minutes because you want the inside to be custardy and the outside to be crisp.

There's a secret ingredient that goes into our batter, which I'll talk about soon.

Now, pancakes.

I make them every weekend.

We went to Japan to the Anea Cafe.

This is a cafe where they love dogs.

And they came out with this massive skillet pancake, about this thick.

Now, it's a totally different approach to pancakes and also has a secret ingredient.

So let's change the way we cook, okay?

Let's change the way we make French toast and the way we make pancakes, and I guarantee these are gonna be the best versions you've ever had.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - Before we get to French toast and pancakes, we're going to Antwerp, Belgium, to visit Regula Ysewijn.

Regula is one of my favorite bakers, and she's a true expert on the history of Belgian waffles.

- Belgium is waffles.

We have a whole array of them, and I have a whole chapter of them in my book, Dark Rye and Honey Cake.

I have just a couple of them here right now.

These are our household waffles.

They're the plainest waffles that we have.

And then we have filled waffles as well, like this one, the lacquemant, only available at fairs, filled with a syrup flavored with orange flower water.

These are stroopwafels and a beautiful, delicate, rolled up waffle, which is made in the very old, round iron waffles, which are carved on the inside.

But today, we are talking about one waffle, and it is our original street food waffle, the only waffle you should really eat in the street, and that's the Liège waffle over here.

Right, guys, we need to talk about waffle irons, because we have so many waffles in Belgium that we also have a couple of different styles of waffle irons.

Now, let me show you.

This is one of the oldest waffle irons that I have.

It has even been in a museum twice.

And it opens like this because in the past, of course, and I'm speaking, you know, before the 18th, 19th century, they didn't have kitchens, so they would make the waffles on an open fire, and they would place this on the ground so that they can pour the batter in, close it, and then-- honestly, guys, this is so heavy-- they would keep it into the fire.

Honestly, they didn't need power training in those days.

Now I'm going to show you my absolute treasure.

This waffle iron over here.

It's the heaviest one.

It's unbelievable.

But wait until you see the inside.

It has, on this side, decoration, and on this side, it has the wedding dates and the names of the couple.

And waffle irons were cast, especially for really, really special occasions like weddings.

But also when, for example, the Duke of Burgundy would visit a town in Flanders, then a waffle iron would be created.

So it's also a form of communication, really.

It's not just something to eat.

So I never really said to myself, I'm going to start collecting waffle irons.

It just starts with the first one.

It's only when you have that actual old... ...waffle iron or gingerbread mold that you know how things were made in the past.

So you need to see the material culture and even try it out to realize how things were done in the past.

Now we have our stovetop iron, which looks very handy.

But in the 1960s, the first electric waffle iron appeared, and that made the lives of those baking waffles a lot easier.

You know what the biggest secret is to making Liège waffles?

It's that it's not hard to make.

It's actually just a kind of brioche dough, but then you add lots of sugar nips to it.

And those sugar nips, they're like, they're quite, quite large, and once you've added that while you're kneading, then, it's done, it's done.

And I keep on telling this to people who bake them for me at this little waffle stand, because when they see me, they want to make me a fresh waffle, and they'll get out a little ball of dough and they'll go like-- and I'll say like, "No, please, please don't."

And they go like, "What?

"We want to make the perfect waffle for you, because you're a judge on Bake Off!"

And I go like, "You know what?

The perfect Liège waffle is twice baked."

That creates a fantastic situation where the waffle iron is full of caramelized sugar, and you put the waffle back in that sugar and you heat it up, and then it becomes darker because of the sugar, and you get these crispy bits of caramel.

And that makes the best Liège waffle.

Oh, yeah, that seems about ready.

Look at those beautiful, caramelized... ...edges here.

Now, all we need is a bit of paper to put around the hot waffle.

And that's how we eat them, just like that.

No toppings.

This really is simple joy.

This is how I like it, eating it outside, like you're supposed to, especially when it's cold.

Just like in my childhood after a day of shopping in Antwerp, warming our hands on the waffle.

♪ ♪ - So, French toast, the first thing you're going to think of is, I don't need a recipe for French toast.

I don't have to follow a recipe for French toast.

Get some slices of white bread, a cup of milk, couple eggs, a little sugar, throw it together with some vanilla.

It turns out that this is one of those recipes, actually, you got to pay attention.

In all of the testing I did for this French toast, there is a secret ingredient, as there often is.

This is semolina flour.

Two tablespoons of semolina flour-- what is semolina flour?

It's just a high-protein wheat-- durum wheat, and they make a flour out of it.

And what it does in pancakes, waffles and French toast is it-- --it's really cool, it makes the inside kind of custardy, while the outside's crisper.

So it helps us get where we want to get, which is the inside of this thing of the French toast actually is quite different than the outside.

And a couple tablespoons of semolina will do it.

One of the things we also understood was you got to let this sit.

Now, when my kids were young, I used to have a little menu.

We'd have corn muffins, baking powder biscuits, French toast, waffles, pancakes and any sort of egg.

And the night before, they'd tell me what they wanted.

I get up early and make it.

So for them, I would just whisk this together and throw the bread in.

The semolina needs-- it's a hard wheat, needs a little time to hydrate.

So we'll let that sit for, you know, maybe ten minutes.

Next thing is the bread.

The Italian loaf seemed to be one of our favorites.

Challah also works fine.

And you want it thick, because again, you want the inside to be, you know, custardy and different than the outside.

A thin slice of bread, that ain't gonna happen.

The next thing you had to do was you need to toast this bread for eight or ten minutes.

And what happens is not what you think, by the way, you think toasting, water evaporates and disappears and dries out the bread.

Actually, what's happening is that moisture is getting trapped inside by the starch granules.

So the water's still in here, it's just been trapped.

And so that's why if you toast bread and leave it out for a long time, it'll start to get soggy again.

But we wanted that bread to trap the moisture.

So again, you're gonna get a nice texture on the outside.

What's interesting is, instead of doing what I used to do when my kids were young, which is dip it on both sides with tongs, pull it out and then let it drain and put it into a skillet, we're actually gonna let this sit.

Challah would be about ten minutes, Italian bread, about 15 minutes.

Flip it halfway through.

Then we're gonna put it in the skillet, Butter in the pan.

We're gonna do two at a time.

And this is pretty straightforward, except there's one other little thing we like.

To get a little bit more crunch on the outside of the French toast, we're going to put a half-teaspoon of sugar on each slice, and then put it sugar-side down, and then put another half-teaspoon on the other side.

So that sugar gives you a little bit of crackling, you know, on the outside of the French toast, which we really liked.

♪ ♪ So it's a good idea to wipe out the pan before you do the next round.

♪ ♪ Now, you can see, by the way, that the, the mixture actually thickened a lot with that semolina.

And letting it sit around, that semolina is really hydrated.

So you get a thicker batter, which is really what you want, because if it's super thin, you're just going to make this toast essentially soggy.

But if it's thicker, you're going to actually get it to be custardy, which is what we're trying to do here.

Our farm in Vermont, until about three years ago, we used to have a big maple syrup operation-- almost 5,000 taps.

We do like 1,200 to 1,500 gallons of finished syrup a year.

Now, as a kid in the '60s, we boiled.

We had a very small arch, it's called an arch evaporator.

And when the syrup was nice and light, it was fancy grade A-- that's what everybody wanted.

So when the syrup later in the season started turning dark like this, people would just stop boiling, right?

Today, nobody wants fancy grade A syrup.

Everybody wants the dark stuff, because the dark stuff actually has all the flavor in my opinion.

And we also have, in March, Open Sap House Day, all around the state.

So the Saturdays and Sundays it's open, you can go in and watch people boiling.

There's actually-- I won't say which town, but right in southern Vermont, halfway through the state, there's a town there, and they have a guy who boils.

But the thing that's funny about it is he boils all year.

Well, sap only runs, you know, March and April.

So the rest of the year, he's boiling water, and you see the steam come up, and all the tourists come and watch him make maple syrup.

He's just boiling water in the arch, which I always love, but he sells a lot of maple syrup that way.

Now, let's talk about butter, because once you get used to salted butter, using unsalted butter just, just doesn't do it.

And by the way, my kids, I make waffles and pancakes every weekend.

They don't put butter on it.

It's like, I, I don't just understand some things.

It's like, what is wrong with this new generation?

Like, would you like butter with your pancakes?

No?

Okay.

♪ ♪ Mm.

Okay.

(chuckles) That is so much better than the French toast I used to make for my kids.

Don't tell my kids that, but... ...so you can see, on the inside, it is really custardy, which is what we're looking for.

And it's nice and crispy on the outside, partially due to the semolina and partially due to the sugar.

You know, it just goes to show, sometimes you think you can just improvise a recipe, like, something like French toast.

Like, who needs a recipe, as I said.

Well, yeah, actually, you kind of do need a recipe.

Like, if you want to learn how to change the way you cook, the best way to do that is to step in someone else's shoes in the kitchen.

You know, try somebody else's recipe, follow their recipe, and if you don't like it, you want to change it, that's fine, but start by following the recipe.

So if you want great French toast, follow our recipe, give it a shot.

But I think you're going to agree this is the best French toast you've ever "et", as they say.

- If you're only baking with regular, white flour, A.P.

or bread flour, even cake flour, it's like you're drawing in black and white, but you could have a whole palette of color.

There are so many other flours out there, and we use them for flavor.

Chris just showed you how to make French toast with semolina flour, Matt's about to show you how to make pancakes with rice flour, but I want to talk about three others right now.

Let's start with rye flour.

With rye flour, you can get dark rye or light rye.

You can imagine one has a stronger flavor-- that's the dark rye-- one has a lighter flavor, but universally they're a little bitter, they're a little molasses-y and they're a little smoky.

We love to toast our rye flour.

We do this in our chocolate chip cookies, and that just intensifies the natural smokiness to the flour.

We also love the combination of fruit and rye flour.

The smoky bitterness of the rye really plays against the natural sweetness of fruit.

We learned to pair rye with fruit from Claire Ptak in London.

She has this upside down fig and rye cake that's to die for.

We also love to pair it with plums and other stone fruit.

When you're toasting flour, which you can do with any flour, including white flour-- don't tell Chris I said this-- you're catalyzing the Maillard reaction.

What that means is you're developing richer, more savory flavors out of the baseline sweetness that all flours, because they're starchy, have.

So what you're looking for when you're toasting flour is both an aroma change and a color change.

And at first you just want to use low heat and don't stir it.

Let things start to happen.

You want to stir it gently because it will burn quickly.

Remember, all those starches are sugars.

Next, let's talk about masa.

So the masa I'm talking about is actually technically masa harina or masa flour.

Masa is the wet dough made from nixtamalized corn, which is corn that is soaked in a solution of lye to slough off the outer layer.

It makes it not only more digestible, but it completely transforms the flavor of the resulting flour.

So where corn flour or cornmeal is sort of sweet and grassy, this is savory and really earthy.

One important thing to remember when you're baking with masa, unlike rye flour, which is a low-gluten flour and develops some gluten, masa develops no gluten.

It can't.

So that means cookies will be a little crumblier.

Pancakes will be a little more tender.

You'll see here, it's sort of like a shortbread cookie.

I love this crumbly texture.

It just melts all the flavors onto your tongue.

But because there's no gluten development, you need to consider that in the recipes you use masa in.

Third, we want to talk about almond flour, or really any nut flour.

So in my pantry, I have pistachios, I have almonds, I have walnuts, hazelnuts.

They can all become flour.

So if a recipe calls for almond flour or maybe pistachio flour and you don't have it, you can make your own.

So here are some blanched almond slices-- we're just gonna put them in a food processor.

And the important thing is just to gently pulse them.

You don't want to grind them.

'Cause then I'll end up with almond butter, which I also love, but that's not what I'm looking for to make this cake.

(pulsing) When you make any nut into a flour, what it does is add a sort of subtle, mild version of that flavor to your baked good.

It also adds a fair degree of fat, which you need to take into account.

The sweetness of almonds are a perfect match for bitter chocolate.

Another nut flour I love to use is chestnut flour.

It's used a lot in Italian baking, especially in the fall, and mixed with chocolate, it's beautiful.

This is just making me think of all the other flours I like to bake with that are not white flour.

I don't have all the time in the world, and neither do you.

So I suggest you at least start with the semolina and the rice from the recipes in this episode.

But also try rye, try masa and try almond flour.

♪ ♪ - (speaking German): - Everything I like-- sugar, eggs, flour, pudding-like texture.

An Austrian pancake.

Mm.

Very good.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - So the best recipes begin with the best stories, and this pancake has a real doozy.

So Chris and I were in Japan last spring, and we were sourcing recipes all over Tokyo, and we were waiting for a restaurant to open and desperately needed a cup of coffee and some calories that weren't, well, little bits of fish or spinach or a little bowl of rice.

So we walked across the street to the only cafe we could find in the neighborhood.

Well, it turned out to be a dog cafe.

So everybody had their little dogs.

I ordered a piece of cheesecake.

Our fixer ordered, I think a salad, and Chris ordered a pancake.

Like, why are you ordering a pancake?

It's like 4:00 in the afternoon.

And he said, "I want a pancake."

When that pancake came out that Chris had ordered, it was literally the size of a skillet.

It was the size of my head, and it was one serving.

It was about that thick, and it came topped with wedges of butter, ice cream, whipped cream, caramel sauce, and I think a side of maple syrup.

So it was like an eight-year-old's vision of what a pancake should be.

It was unbelievable.

The texture is what really sold us.

It had this slight chew to it, and a lightly crispy exterior.

So we brought this idea back to Milk Street and we dug and dug and dug, as we always do, a lot of research and couldn't find anything to really match.

We started playing around and we realized that rice flour was really the hook here.

So rice flour doesn't have gluten, but what it does do to things is it adds this nice chew, nice crispness to the exterior.

So all that said, let's go ahead and make the best skillet pancake with those memories from Japan.

This pancake's really, really easy, of course, that's one of the selling points of this pancake, is you're not not standing over a hot stove, flipping pancakes.

Everything goes into the skillet all at once.

We throw it in the oven, come back in 15 minutes and it's done, ready for the table.

So three-quarter cup A.P.

flour.

It's one-quarter cup plus two tablespoons of rice flour.

I know it sounds fussy to say a quarter-cup plus two tablespoons rice flour, but it's the right amount and it's easy enough to measure.

And then we're going to add a quarter-cup of white sugar.

And one-and-a-half teaspoons baking powder for lift.

And a quarter-teaspoon baking soda, and then it's a quarter-teaspoon of table salt.

You do want to make sure that the eggs are room temperature-- cold eggs can lead to a flat batter.

And then we're going to add one cup of milk.

And... one tablespoon lemon juice.

Why the lemon juice?

It's not just for flavor.

The acid in the lemon juice helps the leaveners work.

You can also add a couple tablespoons of yogurt instead of the lemon if you don't happen to have a lemon.

Or if you're like my house, we always have buttermilk, we make a lot of pancakes, a lot of waffles, a lot of biscuits, always have buttermilk.

You can just use buttermilk in this recipe instead of that milk, lemon juice combo.

So at this point, we're going to add our four tablespoons of melted butter.

So we're going to blend that and let's stir our vanilla in, we've got a teaspoon of vanilla extract.

I double it, but that's me.

So I'm going to switch to a spatula from the whisk and just fold that in and it's going to be pretty lumpy.

And that's okay-- as it bakes, it's going to even out.

We need a ten-inch skillet that's oven safe.

You have to be able to put that skillet in your oven.

And we're going to preheat it on the stovetop, now, we're doing a couple things here, we're going to heat a tablespoon more butter because butter makes it better.

We're going to use the butter in two ways.

First of all, it's going to indicate when the pan is hot enough to add the batter, and we're going to lightly toast the butter.

So what happens when you toast butter?

You're bringing out the flavors, you're browning those milk solids in the butter, which adds just another element to this really simple pancake.

We've added the batter.

The butter is going to bubble up around the edges, and we're going to cook it for one minute on the stovetop.

So that one minute allows the crust to start setting.

And then we're going to slide it into the oven.

Ah, it's looking great and smells like heaven.

That pancake is looking just fantastic.

It's set across the top.

We don't want to overcook it, because then it's going to dry out and we're going to flip this out.

Fingers crossed.

Oh, that is just... well, that is a gorgeous pancake.

Here's one of the problems with this recipe.

You could say this is four servings.

I'd say it's about two.

So depends how big your kids are, how big your appetite is.

We'll call it four servings today.

So I'm gonna cut it into quarters here.

And it's really crisp and light and fluffy.

And you can smell that brown butter.

One of the things I love about brown butter is that aroma you get by toasting it.

It's really just heavenly.

It's still plain at this point, but let me go ahead and top that.

I feel like I need a maple syrup farm, the way our family goes through maple syrup.

The crisp exterior, that interior is just gorgeous.

One of the amazing things about this pancake recipe is that rice flour.

And it's not, it doesn't stand out, but what it does is it magnifies the quality of that pancake, it adds that crispiness you really want.

It's the platonic ideal of what a pancake should be to me.

As ridiculous as that experience was with Chris eating this pancake at a dog cafe, totally jet lagged, desperately needing coffee, it is an indelible memory I have now.

I will forever remember eating pancakes with Chris Kimball in Tokyo, which is just the most ridiculous statement.

It's an amazing recipe and sometimes it is the serendipitous recipes that really stick close.

And that's one of the reasons we really travel is, you know, we go out with this great plan for sourcing amazing recipes to bring back.

And sometimes it's the recipes you never thought that are gonna click that really end up clicking.

And this is one of those.

You can get this recipe and all the other recipes from this season of Milk Street at MilkStreet.TV.com.

- Recipes and episodes from this season of Milk Street are available at MilkStreetTV.com, along with shopping lists, printer-ready recipes and our tips and techniques library.

Access our content anytime to change the way you cook.

- The season ten Milk Street Cookbook is now available, and includes every recipe from our TV show.

From Brazilian cheese puffs and French toast, to skillet lasagna and Japanese cheesecake, the new Milk Street Cookbook offers bolder, fresher, simpler recipes.

Order your copy of The Milk Street Cookbook for $34.95-- 40% less than the cover price.

Call 855-MILK-177 or order online.

- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

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