Triple French Toast

This is a recipe for when you just can't fail enough.

Ingredients

• Bread
  
  
  
  • 2.5c enriched unbleached white flour
    
  • 2.25tsp yeast (1 packet)
    
  • pinch salt
    
  • ~1tsp sugar (approximate)
    
  • warm water
    
  
  
• Custard
  
  
  
  • 1 egg
    
  • 1/2c mlk
    
  • pinch of salt
    
  • 1tsp sugar
    
  • 1/2 cap vanilla extract
    
  
  

Okay, first you make the bread. Mix the flour, yeast, sugar, and salt in a bowl. Add water and mix until you get a dough, very slightly damp. Flour the counter and knead it for a few minutes until it's smooth. Set it aside and let it rise until doubled, about an hour. Preheat the oven for 400. Take risen dough and pat it out into a rectangle about 3/8in thick, and then roll it into a log shape. Make slits in the top (optional, really). Cover and let rise for another hour. This is the step I skipped, so if you want "Triple French Toast" to come out the way I made it, don't let it re-rise. Bake until it looks done and the top is golden.

Slice the bread. If you DIDN'T let it rise a second time, it's probably way too dense. Not really good to eat. Here's what I did:

Make about 4 "batches" of the custard (4 eggs, 2c milk, etc). Pour the custard over the bread in a big baking sheet and let it sit covered overnight to absorb the custard. In the morning, make it into French toast.

Now again, I messed this up. The bread was fresh, so it didn't absorb enough of the custard. Also, I forgot the salt, so it was pretty flavorless. Damn it. French toast was supposed to be my fix for my LAST error. So I proceeded a third time. I made YET ANOTHER three "batches" of custard, but this time with a little extra salt. I cut the french toast into cubes and put them in a bread pan. Then I sprinkled cinnamon and sugar over them along with some raisins. I poured the custard over them and let it sit for a while. Then, I put it in the oven set at 350, covered in tin foil. After about 30 minutes, I took the tin foil off and put a baking sheet in the bottom of the oven filled with water. The steam it produced gently cooked the custard around the French toast. It's hard to overcook, but check in on this mixture after about fifteen minutes, and then every five to ten minutes after that. Take it out when the custard looks pretty set on top and the bread pudding just BARELY jiggles when you shake the pan.

Thoughts: Nobody is ever going to make this. But I needed to put it up for two reasons: 1) It is really delicious. How many people have ever made bread pudding out of French toast? 2) It demonstrates an important property to remember when you're baking bread: it's easy to mess up, but it's not the end of the world.

I thought this was great. I'm going to be eating it with maple syrup tomorrow morning. This is also the first time I've ever gotten bread pudding to come out correctly - the baking dish with water was inspired and worked. On a disaster index, this can't really be a 1, because it was actually two consecutive disasters followed by a genius cover-up. Also, it would be a little better if I'd used a little salt in the first batch of French toast custard and then, after preparing the bread pudding, if I'd sprinkled just a little brown sugar over the top (to caramelize).

Disaster Index: 2-3/10.