3 Simple Ways to Make French Toast Crispy

The custardy inside and toasted, buttery outside of French toast are legendary. Consider what it may be if you add a crispiness to the exterior to contrast with the soft, delicious insides!

Continue reading to learn how to create crispy French toast while keeping the textural difference between the crust and the center. You won’t want to miss out on this!

How to Make French Toast Crispy

In its simplest form, French toast is comprised of stale or dry bread dipped in an egg and dairy custard and cooked in butter. This results in a browned outside and a pudding-like inside.

However, the exterior crust seldom becomes crispy. This is due to the fact that the bread cannot be exposed to high enough heat to brown and dry the top while still cooking the insides all the way through.

So, if you try to cook it at high heat, the bread will brown too quickly while the interior stays raw. You wouldn’t want it with eggs in the mix.

To compensate for the moisture of the bread dipped in the custard, you may make a crust with an already crunchy substance. Consider your French toast to be thicker and more syrup-laden than chicken schnitzel or Japanese katsu.

1 – Get Creative With the Coating

There are numerous crumbs that might be really useful in this application. We’ll start with the most widely used in restaurants for crispy French toast and finish with one you may not have expected.

Corn Flakes

Corn flakes are a common ingredient in crispy French toast. After all, you already identify it with breakfast, so adding corn flakes to the mix will not throw you off.

There are various techniques to crush corn flakes into tiny pieces to use as a crumb layer for French toast:

• Put them in a zip-top bag and smash them with a rolling pin.
• Alternatively, place them in a food processor and pulse on and off until the appropriate texture is achieved.

However, there are advantages and disadvantages to using corn flakes. The taste is fantastic, so that’s a plus! However, if you don’t flavor your French toast custard sufficiently, it might be little overbearing.

Corn flakes crisp up well in butter as well, but be careful not to overbrown them or burn the butter, as their nuttiness will quickly become bitter.

Oat Cereal

Oat cereals, like corn flakes, are a morning staple. You wouldn’t be incorrect if you thought of Cheerios or the Crunch in Capn Crunch right now.

Because these cereals are crunchy and airy on their own, mashing them and covering French toast with them makes sense. Aside from the inherent nutty taste, they retain their crispness for a long time after frying.

However, avoid sweetened oat cereals for this application since the sugar in them will caramelize quickly in the butter and cause the French toast to adhere to the pan. Not to mention the bitter and burned flavor of everything.

Graham Cracker Crumbs

Graham crackers serve as the base for numerous desserts. Consider cheesecakes, pies, smores, and almost all icebox cakes. Simply delicious!

The same delectable flavor may be obtained by covering your crispy French toast with graham cracker crumbs. When the crumbs touch the butter, something wonderful occurs.

If you want to go all out, pair your French toast with one of the desserts recommended above. Crispy French toast with key lime curd and fresh whipped cream, for example, or smores filled French toast with chocolate and marshmallows in the center.

Panko Bread Crumbs

If you’re unfamiliar with Panko, it’s a Japanese breadcrumb that’s crushed considerably bigger than regular breadcrumbs. It’s also dried rather than roasted, which gives it a softer taste and a lighter color when fried.

This is a little strange, I admit, but bear with me. Panko crisps up better than practically any other material on the planet. And what damage can a little additional bread do in a bread-based dish?

It doesn’t taste very good since it’s simply white breadcrumbs, but what it lacks in flavor, it more than makes up for in texture. A Panko-coated slice of French toast has significantly more crunch and crispiness than any of the preceding selections.

The best part is that it retains its crispiness even after being soaked in maple syrup. It will also stay crispy for a longer period of time, which is useful if you’re cooking a large quantity.

Now that we’ve covered the coating, let’s talk about the frying procedure that produces the maximum crispiness.

2 – Use Clarified Butter

Cook traditional French toast on a griddle, nonstick, or cast iron skillet with enough butter to cover the bottom.

Crispy French toast requires a bit extra butter since you’re attempting to get through the crispy layer to the bread itself. As a result, the crumbs will not burn while the interior stays raw.

The difficulty here is that normal butter may create a slew of problems.

Because ordinary butter contains 15% water, you must keep it on the heat until the water evaporates and the butter begins to froth, or else it will become oily and mushy.

And if you do, you’ll run into another problem: the milk solids in the butter will begin to burn before your French toast is properly cooked.

Clarified butter must be the solution to these problems. It has the same rich, nutty taste as the original but without the bitter black pieces or uneven frying.

To produce clarified butter, just melt some butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Then, wait for the froth to settle and the milk solids to get somewhat golden.

After that, strain the butter through a sieve fitted with a coffee filter to capture any remaining particles, and voilà! You now have clarified butter, which will make cooking your French toast much simpler.

3 – Change Your Frying Method

Here are some frying ways for crispy French toast.

Shallow Frying

This is the most typical method of preparing French toast. In a nonstick skillet over medium-high heat, melt two tablespoons of clarified butter and swirl it around before adding your soaked and crumb-coated bread.

It’s a really simple procedure since you can check the bread for doneness. When the first side of the toast is toasted, use a spatula to carefully turn it to the other side.

Reduce the heat if the bread seems to be browning too quickly.

When you’re through with a batch, wipe the pan clean of leftover butter and crumbs and reapply butter to the pan. This is critical if you want the final piece to taste just as nice as the first.

Frying then Baking

Any admirer of huge old Texas toast will want to turn it into crispy French toast. If that’s the case, you should double-cook it.

Shallow frying produces a crispy, golden outside, but the insides may not cook as quickly.

To avoid eating raw eggs, fry the toast in clarified butter as normal, then set the finished slices on a rack and continue cooking in a 300 degree oven for approximately 10 minutes.

If you’re having brunch on Sunday, this is a terrific way to make French toast for a crowd!

Deep Frying

If you wish to follow in the footsteps of fast food restaurants, deep fry your French toast to guarantee uniform cooking, crispiness, and an irresistible golden hue.

However, instead of cooking the bread whole, I propose cutting it into long strips. This makes the pieces simpler to turn and increases the surface area of the crumb-coated surface.

Preheat a pan with neutral oil, such as canola or peanut, to 350 degrees F. Then, using a slotted spoon or wire spider, delicately lower your French toast pieces.

Every 30 seconds, flip the pieces till golden brown and crispy. Allow them to cool somewhat on a wire rack before dusting with powdered sugar and drizzling with syrup.

Final Thoughts

Learning how to create crispy French toast will give the custardy staple a new spin. This is a two-step procedure that includes a crumb coating and a cooking method to achieve a crisp surface and thoroughly cooked within.

Corn flakes, oat cereal, graham cracker crumbs, or Panko breadcrumbs are all options for coating the bread. They each have their own set of characteristics and benefits that they bring to the taste and texture.

You may either shallow fry the French toast, add an additional baking step to ensure it’s cooked through, or deep fried it for a super-crispy golden exterior.

What I can promise is that they will all be fantastic!