French Toast with Yoghurt and Pomegranate

  

Yield: 4 servings.
Level: Easy
Duration: 40 minutes (excludes shopping time and time of washing dishes, blessed are you who got house maid back in Indo LOL).












I like to browse for recipes in the Internet and my favorite website is Taste.com.au. The main purpose is usually not to look for inspiration, but rather to look at pictures of yummy food, lol. But, when I am actually looking for recipe of something, I often question the duration. It probably means "cooking time" and it can say something like 15 minutes or 30 minutes, but it saddens me a little how when I cook in reality, it took much longer than the indicated duration. Having to wash dishes is to blame here... it will be much better to cook in Indonesia if you have a house maid, so you don't have to wash all the dishes. But then again, it won't be as easy as it is in Australia, to get your hands on fresh ingredients. So no complaining here...

INGREDIENTS:

• 4 large slices of sourdough bread (about half inch thick, preferably stale)
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 1/4 cup whole milk
• 1 tbs maple syrup, extra for drizzling
• 4 tbs white sugar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamond
• pinch of sea salt
• dash of rose water, optional
• butter, for frying
• 1 Pomegranate fruit, de-seeded
• 100g peeled pistachio
• 4 Oreo cookies
• 1 strawberry Chobani yoghurt

METHOD:

To start making this French Toast, I like to prepare my topping first before frying my toast, so once my toast is done, I can quickly put toppings on it.

Anyway, today I have my first experience of de-seeding a pomegranate (or Pome, pomegranate is too long to type repeatedly) and see an actual pome fruit. The closest to a pome fruit I've ever seen is on a label of bottled pome juice. Here's where I learn to de-seed a pome fruit:

My fingertip turns wrinkly from soaking it in the water for too long while I de-seed the pome. For those of you who have never tried a pome... the seed look like corn kernel and it tasted sour with berries kind of flavor. It has an even smaller seed in each kernel, which is edible. You can put it through a strainer and get yourself a nice pomegranate juice, or eat it as it is as a snack. Here, I use this as the topping of my french toast.

Oreo crumb x pistachio

Oreo is supposed to be Twisted, Licked and Dunked. But, today I decided to only twist it and take the cookie without the sweet cream and crumbled it with my fingers. For the pistachio, I put it in a sandwich bag and bash it with a wooden rolling pin. Topping done.

Next, prepare the egg-milk mixture. Combine the egg, milk, vanilla essence, rose water (optional), cinnamon, maple syrup and sugar. Whisk until the sugar dissolve. Done.
You can use any kinds of bread for making french toast (I recommend brioche), for better result, use a stale bread so that it soaks up the egg-milk mixture better. Here I used a two day old sourdough bread, but because I wrapped it tightly so it's not too stale. Slice your bread to about 1/2 inch thick.

Let your bread skin dip in the egg-milk mixture. Some recipes that I found says leave it for 5 minutes to soak. But because my bread wasn't that stale, I only soak it for a minute.

While your bread is soaking, melt your butter on a skillet over medium-high heat. Once it melted, reduce the heat before adding the soaked bread. I used Meadowlea for 65% less saturated fat. 

Fry each side until it's brown, took approximately 1.5 minutes, but keep checking. Here is how brown it's supposed to be.

While waiting for the toast to brown, I open up my Chobani yogurt and give it a little whisk, because the strawberry is at the bottom. If you haven't tried strawberry Chobani, please do, they're really good.

Once your toast is brown on both side, put it on a plate and top as you desire. You can definitely modify the topping with other thing, such as ice cream, whipped cream, honey, blueberries, strawberries, caramelised banana... or even better, caramelised bacon. Don't forget to drizzle some maple syrup! 

Here are some pictures of my French Toast with Yoghurt and Pomegranate:

As the toast cooled down, the caramelized top crisped up a little, giving it a pleasant texture. The more sugar you use in the egg-milk mixture, the crispier it will be. The inside will be soft, moist and sweet. What a perfect brunch for a summer morning. Or even supper. Or dessert. Or whenever, actually.