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German Toast

German Toast is a fried bread dish made with stale bread, milk, eggs, butter, lard, baking powder, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 the bread

  1. Dip stale bread slices in milk, then in beaten eggs.

  2. Brown the slices on a buttered griddle.

Make the batter and fry

  1. For the batter, mix 2 eggs, 1 cup milk, 1 teaspoon baking powder, and enough flour to make a thin batter.

  2. Dip thin slices of bread in the batter and fry in hot lard.

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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread slices
Absorb the milk and egg mixture and form the body of the toast.
Eggs
Bind the bread and batter and help set the coating as it cooks.
Milk
Moistens the bread and thins the batter so it coats the slices.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping it rise and turn light and puffy.
Flour
Thickens the batter so it clings to the bread and forms a crisp coating.

The step that matters

Frying in hot lard. If the lard is not hot enough, the batter soaks up fat and turns greasy instead of crisping. Hot fat sets the outside quickly, so the coating browns well and the inside stays moist.

“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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