What if you wake up tomorrow morning, tomorrow being Saturday, and you find yourself craving something savory, but you have all the ingredients for making French Toast?
Do you kowtow to your lazy, uninspired side and start heating the maple syrup, or do you allow inspiration to strike? Choose the latter path, the one less traveled by, and you will wind up with what I wound up with last week: French Toad-in-the-Hole!
Toad-in-the-Hole is, of course, that breakfast staple where you cut the hole out of a piece of bread, put it in a pan with butter and crack an egg into it. The French part comes from what I did to it first. In a pie plate, I whisked together 1 egg and about 1/2 a cup of whole milk. Then, after cutting holes in a few slices of sesame bread purchased from Gourmet Garage, I soaked it in that French Toasty custard:
Because this is a savory dish, next time I plan to play around with that milk/egg mixture. What if you added Tabasco to it? What if you added freshly grated Parmesan cheese? The possibilities are endless.
By soaking it, you’ll get that puffed-up caramelized richness that you get from French Toast, but once again, this isn’t French toast. In a non-stick skillet or a cast iron pan, you heat a tablespoon or so of butter until it’s foamy and hot and then you add your soaked-bread, cracking an egg into each hole:
Sprinkle the eggs with good salt (I used Maldon sea salt) and a few grindings of pepper and wait a minute until the bottom gets a good color and a good seal, then flip everything over:
Doesn’t that look far out? Cook just 30 seconds more (it cooks faster on the second side) and then when the white is set but the yolk’s still runny, lift it on to plates. Sprinkle with parsley, and if you used it in the batter, some more Parmesan cheese.
That’s French-Toad-in-the-Hole!
Who’d a thunk it?
Toad on the ole is a savory English Dish eaten for lunch or an evening meal. It is English sausages (Bangers) baked in the oven in Yorkshire Pudding. So the sausages are in holes in the pudding. The egg dish referenced here is called egg in a basket or egg in a nest or egg in a hole.