How to make traditional French toast (the way it is made in France)

Hi there! Stéphane here from the French Cooking Academy on location in France, and today we're going to be talking about brioche and French toast. Look at this piece of brioche, nice and fluffy, pure butter, and do you think this is going to make a good recipe for French toast? Absolutely not. You don't use this at all for the real pain perdu as it's called in France. French toast has become something a bit new, so let's discard that thing. Now that is what you need, a good old baguette that is actually totally stale. That's the key ingredient for the real old-fashioned pain perdu. Let's discover how to make it the real way. Now here are the ingredients you're going to need for that recipe, all the details will be in the video description. Now why do we call that recipe pain perdu? First you need to understand what it translates to. Pain perdu means the lost bread, the bread that's gone, it means basically an unusable stale bread. Well back in the days, the poor people found it really unethical to throw away bread because it was such an important piece of food and it was also expensive, so they found a way to recycle that by mixing it with egg and milk and cook it in butter and sprinkle with sugar to make a dessert, and this is how it's kind of born, it's been basically made the same way for generations. So let's have a look today how to make that old-fashioned recipe the traditional way. Now the very first step of course of all is try to cut your stale bread, this is two days old so it kind of has a little tenderness to it but very very slight and I don't even have a bread knife, cooking on holiday is hard. So you need to basically try to slice, I'm going to put that shape to make it more fun, and you don't want something too thick nor too thin because it needs to cook and absorb some of the milk so we're going to, you know, do a thing about maybe half an inch or something and this is the type of slice I'm going to make, so I'm going to continue to cut this off camera so we have our bread prepared. Mission accomplished, I've got the bread, now we can move on to the next step. Once your bread is cut, the next step is extremely simple, you take your milk and you pour it in a large enough container so we can dip the bread in. Once the milk is in, you're going to add a little bit of salt, just a pinch. Take a whisk and you mix well. To finish, you're going to take your eggs and just break them in a container. Same thing here, when it's done you're going to add a little bit of salt which is going to allow the eggs to blend together nicely and that's it, it's all you need to make your pain perdu. As I said before, the traditional method is slightly different, you don't mix things together so we're going to take these bowls and put them on the stove, take our pan and start cooking the bread. I think by now you must be thinking, what on earth is that guy doing? So the first step is to warm up your butter here, I'm using induction so it's kind of difficult, you can make a burn with it and the way it works basically, you need to dip your bread first in the milk like this, so you soak it everywhere and then you dip it in the eggs so there's no sugar involved and then when you've got your piece of bread, and then you just put it in your butter and start cooking and this is how you actually make a real traditional pain perdu. Let's have a closer look at this, so I put my bread in the pan and the key here is not to put too much milk, so really a quick plunge in the milk and immediately in the egg and when you get a bit of color like that and nice and brown, you want to turn them around so you get that yellow from the eggs, the brown crust, it smells good, that's a real pain perdu. And that's it, we're all done, here is the pain perdu, as you can see they're simple slices of bread cooked in butter but you may ask where is the sugar, well it's here, the sugar you see goes at the end and you sprinkle it over and you need plenty of it and yes many people think my god it's too much sugar but it has to be sugar, there's no way around it, so you coat this and you can serve it just like that, but look at this, what was a stale bread is now really really soft, look at that, wow it really tastes absolutely beautiful and I'm really reconnecting with my roots here, having that pain perdu but you see it's a very simple recipe to make and the way to make it is quite different so remember a little bit of milk, plenty of eggs, plenty of butter and get these colors going, now try this traditional method and tell me what you think on the comment section. But that completes my video for the day guys, I hope you enjoyed it and I see you all very soon for some more French cooking videos from France, bye bye!