eggy bread

It's eggs, but it's bready. It's bread, but it's eggy.

It's eggs! It's bread! It's both! It's neither!

Description

Bread cooked with egg. The merkins seem to have something similar over there called French Toast.

Simplification

Mix eggs in a bowl, dip bread in, fry it.

Indoctrination

Nostalgia

It was a staple of my childhood diet: I remember sitting on the high stools in the kitchen, waiting in turn with my siblings for a slice to come out of the pan and onto my plate.

Before I became too old for such things, I even used to get tost fel ty (literal translation: toast like house): the food was cut and rearranged so it was just like a house. Magic.

Propaganda

I've recently rediscovered eggy bread as a self-catering student. It's cheap, it's satisfying, it's quick, it's simple. It may even be healthy, but I'm no nutritionist.

Eggy bread is one of those magic recipies which takes a small number of simple components and, via some ineffable transformation, produces something greater than the sum of its parts.

Preparation

Parts

• Eggs.
• Bread.

You can use white bread or brown. You can leave the crusts on, or remove them. I use crusty brown doorstops. As for eggs, you can't go far wrong. You can use free range, you can choose not to - I'll leave that to your conscience.

Of course, you'll need oil and butter for cooking, and it's quite plausible that you'll want something else with your eggy bread, but, at core, it's eggs and bread.

Proportions

In my experience, the bread-slice-to-egg ratio varies depending on how big and how absorbent the bread is, and the size of the eggs you're using. For thicker slices with smaller eggs for someone who likes their bread drenched in egg, you can use up one egg for each slice of bread. For smaller, thinner slices with large eggs for someone who is more conservative in the egg-coating, each egg will make two slices. Do it, and see what works for you.

Construction

1. Break the eggs into a bowl, and mix them. You don't need to beat them properly, just enough so that they're fairly consistent. Make sure the bowl is nice and wide and shallow so you can move your bread slices around in it later.
2. Season the eggs. I just use pepper.
3. Heat some oil and some butter in a pan, until it's hot, but not smoking.
4. For each slice of bread:
   1. Slather (or merely coat) the slice with the egg mixture by dropping it in the bowl, moving it around a bit, turning it over, and moving it about a bit more.
   2. Lift the bread out of the bowl using some sort of lifting implement, and allow as much egg as you want to run off to run off.
   3. Drop the egg in the pan.
   4. Cook the first side to your preferred level of crispiness.
   5. Flip.
   6. Cook the second side to you preferred level of crispiness.

Try not to let it stick.

Consumption

Eat according to standard operating procedure.

Augmentation and Variation

My favourites:

• Before dipping, spreading some Marmite (that's yeast extract) on
• Cinnamon and sugar
• Smothering it with honey
• Putting some marmalade on it
• Frying some itsy tomatoes (halved) with it

Suggestions:

• You can leave out the butter.
• You can include some salt.
• Try adding some Worcestershire sauce
• Or maybe some cheese? Some grated cheddar? Or just a sprinkling of parmesan?

Other noders:

• Wiccanpiper tells me that over in Kentucky they call it "French Toast" and put Maple Syrup on it!
• TallRoo says "Once cooked, try sprinkling just a little sugar over it. Wonderful stuff."

What do you do to your eggy bread? I'm waiting to hear from you.

Conclusion

Yum.