Name: How NYC’s Best French Toast is Made | Made to Order | Bon Appétit
Uploaded: 2026-02-14T16:41:38.000Z
Duration: 12 min 11 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hi, I'm Neil Kleinberg, chef owner of Clinton Street Baking Company and restaurant.

And today we're going to make the perfect brioche French toast.

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Clinton street has been here almost 25 years.

We're just known for making the most delicious breakfast and brunch foods.

The French toast is one of our top sellers.

On the weekends, we could sell up to 50 orders a day.

What makes the perfect French toast is a few components.

The batter, the garnish, and the maple butter.

And I'm going to show you the most important part right now, which is our brioche bread.

It's like a white bread enriched with eggs and egg yolks and butter.

And it makes it so golden and so tender and so beautiful.

And that's what you're going to taste when you eat the French toast.

And we like to slice it really nice and thick.

Beautiful thick slices, 2 inches, 3 inches, however you like it.

If you can't get brioche, challah is a nice stand in.

The difference between challah and brioche is challah's made with oil and it makes it very soft.

And you can really taste the butter in that bread when you bake it and when you cook it.

If you don't have brioche, you can't get challah.

But I would go with like a simple, good quality white bread a day old French bread.

Downstairs we have a full bakery where we make at least 80 loaves a week.

The shape of the brioche is called the Pullman shape or a Pullman loaf, named after the famous Pullman train cars.

And they come out like a big square with a little dome on the top.

If you're making this at home, cut the bread a little thick.

I'm talking an inch and a half to two inches thick.

The thickness of the bread has a lot to do with how much batter is absorbed.

And when you absorb a good amount of batter, you're absorbing all the flavor.

If I cook this brioche too thin, you're not going to get any of the fluffiness, the texture and the nuance as if you'd sliced it thick.

This bread, right out of the oven, it's very soft.

You need to rest it a day so that you get a really nice firm texture in between inside.

But once you dip it in the batter, if it's a day old, it just sucks up the batter and it makes it really really nice.

Our bread is sliced, and it's time to move on to the batter.

The biggest mistake people make about the batter is too much milk, not enough egg.

We're using half and half because heavy cream, it's too rich.

So we use half and half, which is half cream and half milk, which makes it a little lighter, a little easier to work with three or four eggs.

So I would say the ratio is three parts half and half to one part egg.

I'm going to just whisk this together, and you're going to see the color change a little bit.

Sometimes the milk and cream are a little richer.

Then, as you can see, it's starting to get a little golden in color.

The consistency I'm looking for is the consistency of heavy cream.

And I'm making sure that the whites and the yolks are whisked in really nice.

The next thing I'm going to do is add a little bit of vanilla.

Home cooks often skip the use of real vanilla extract.

I also like to add a little bit of vanilla paste.

It has specks of the vanilla bean in it, and it makes the batter nice and speckled.

You could really smell the beautiful vanilla bean flavor.

This batter should be a little bit sweet.

So I'm going to add maybe a half a cup of sugar.

Then I'm going to add a nice pinch of cinnamon.

You want that flavor to come out in the batter.

The salt pulls together the seasoning of the whole thing.

And then this beautiful organic lemon oil.

This is like a lemon extract made from organic lemons and also some orange oil.

There's a lot of nice oils coming out of the orange peel.

The citrus is adding the nuance, pulling the whole entire flavor profile together.

It keeps the cinnamon integrated into the batter.

You see a little bit of cinnamon extraggling at the end.

I'm just going to pour that batter right in there.

When we go to dip the French toast, we're gonna dip it in a square container like that, and

But I'm dipping it enough so the brioche is absorbing all of that beautiful batter.

You could even see some of the cinnamon coming up to the top.

You could actually see it getting porous in here.

You can actually see the batter entering the middle of the bread and then you'll actually feel the weight.

It's soaked in the middle, but it's not over soaked.

You know how sometimes if you're making French toast at home and you don't drain it and you put it in your pan and you get that egg ring around, that's bad.

And that comes from the batter itself, not having too much egg in the batter and also draining it.

So when that you go to the stove to cook it in your pan, you're not going to have that excess ring coming out of the brioche.

You dip it and drain it and then you want to move to the stove.

The first thing we're going to do is we're going to hit this griddle with some clarified butter.

No milk solids in it, so it's not going to burn.

If you have something at home like a cast iron pan or a thickle griddle or an electric griddle, that's great too.

So we're going to take our dipped brioche, we're going to put it right on the clarified butter and then we're going to hit it with a little more clarified butter in between, just to get the nooks and crannies going.

The clarified butter cooks it long enough, gets a crust around it without burning it.

We're going to add a little bit of whole butter in in between the French toast.

A little knob there and a little knob there.

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How NYC’s Best French Toast is Made | Made to Order | Bon Appétit

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