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German Toast

German Toast is a dish of stale bread soaked in beaten eggs and milk, fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

German Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut stale bread into ½-inch slices and remove the crust.

  2. In a bowl, slightly beat the eggs and dilute with milk; add salt and sugar.

  3. Soak the bread slices in the egg mixture for a few moments.

Cook

  1. Carefully lift the soaked bread with a spatula and place on a hot, well-greased griddle using equal parts lard and butter.

  2. Brown one side, then turn and brown the other side, adding more lard and butter if necessary.

Serve

  1. Serve with maple syrup for breakfast or luncheon, or with apricot sauce for dessert.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Milk + apricottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the custard and set on the bread to form a golden coating.
Milk
Thins the egg mixture so it soaks into the bread and keeps the slices moist.
Stale bread
Dry bread soaks up the egg mixture without falling apart, giving a sturdy slice.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour and helps the surface brown on the hot griddle.
Lard
Adds fat that tolerates high heat, helping the surface brown evenly without burning.

The step that matters

Browning on the griddle. The griddle must be hot and well greased. If it is too cool, the soaked bread absorbs fat and turns soggy instead of browning; if it is too hot, the outside burns before the custard sets in the centre.

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, bread, egg, sugar, butter, maple syrup, sauce):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pumpkinfits better
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, egg, sugar, butter, maple syrup, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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