Fancy French toast and cheap brioche 🥖
A lovely lemony bake, cold smoked fish, and baby’s first brioche.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things I Ate! This week, we make fancy french toast and buy mass-produced brioche. Check out past posts here, and please follow my Instagram @fivethingsiate.
Baked blackberry ricotta French toast at home
Recipe adapted from Half Baked Harvest.
This is honestly such a beautiful, lovely showstopper of a brunch recipe I have nothing snarky or funny to say about it. It makes a great birthday or holiday gift, you can assemble everything in a pretty dish the night before, and drop it off with baking instructions to your loved ones. There are several “squee” factors to this bake that make me heart-eyed: One, it’s really pretty; browned slices of brioche floating in a soft pool of ricotta custard; two: it smells really nice, of lemon-zest and vanilla; third: you make cute little JAM SANDWICHES with brioche before you pour custard all over it which means you’re baking tiny custardy JAM SANDWICHES and everybody loves filling. It’s perfectly light and fluffy, not too sweet, and absolutely magical. Fresh blackberries melt into jammy pools as the casserole bakes and you serve it with fresh ricotta whipped cream. My only tips are that I found that the slices of bread fit better if you made sandwiches and then cut them in half hot-dog style; also, cover with foil for the last 15 minutes so it doesn’t burn. Oh, and serve with an additional drizzle of maple syrup. Find the recipe here.
Nature's Own® Perfectly Crafted™ Thick Sliced Brioche Style bread at Walmart
Also most grocery stores in the not-fancy bread aisle.
Brioche is not bread, it is cake that has lied on its resume, and you know what? I support the hustle.I will absolutely confess that I don’t actually think I’ve bought a loaf of brioche on its own before this week, when I decided to recreate brunch french toast at home; I’m so entrenched in my New York/New Jersey upbringing that all I’ve eaten before that was challah, which I thought was essentially the same thing but Jewish. It turns out it is not! Brioche is very not kosher and very rich and tastes buttery and different. Anyways this is all old news to you sophisticated readers who have been eating brioche for years but I am still really enamoured by this $2.99 mass produced loaf you can find at Walmart. I used it to make the best french toast ever (see above), but if you toast it and slather it with butter and/or ricotta and berry jam you will have almost as good a time for way less effort.
Japanese curry with leftover turkey at home
Make this at home.
Japanese curry is the absolute best use of leftover turkey, in my biased opinion. It’s extremely easy to make, can use up as much or as little turkey meat as you want, and most importantly of all, tastes so different from a traditional Thanksgiving meal that it doesn’t feel like leftovers. I am a huge fan of curry roux blocks (here’s my favorite brand, I like it medium hot), the best pre-made kitchen ingredient of all time (fight me!!). It’s almost impossible to fuck up Japanese curry using roux blocks; if you want to do a really good job you can look up a recipe online, but I just dice a yellow onion, one big carrot, and three small potatoes, sautee the veggies over medium heat until they wilt, add 1.5 cups of water, cover, and let boil for 15 minutes or until tender, stir in one pack (3.5oz) of curry roux, and 1-2 cups of shredded Thanksgiving turkey, and serve over freshly steamed rice. In a meta way, the curry also makes very good leftovers; the flavors only meld together and get more tasty over time. The first day, I like to serve it with freshly steamed rice; the second day, I boil some ramen and stir in the leftover curry for a delicious curry ramen.
Shànghǎi xūn yú (熏魚) at home
You can buy this at restaurants and Asian grocery stores.
Xun Yu means “smoked fish,” but this fish is not actually smoked, but deep fried and steeped in a smoky-sweet-salty sauce. Just like pineapple buns, the title is a misnomer; but it’s a con I’m willing to fall for. This dish shows up magically every so often at family dinner; it’s not the kind of dish you make at home (or at least, definitely not in my tiny home), but if you’re ambitious I’m sure it’d be even better homemade. You’re supposed to eat it cold, like an appetizer; I sacrilegiously like to heat my xūn yú up and eat it over rice.
Khao soi with mock duck at Sala Thai
307 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10023
My favorite Thai noodle dish to order for delivery is not pad thai or pad see ew (although I love them both), but khao soi. I love how rich and spicy and coconutty the broth is, and that is topped with crunchy fried noodles that you stir into the soup and let sog (there has to be a word for the texture I like so much, of something having been fried, and then softened again, like tempura in broth). Also, the whole thing is topped with slices of pickled Chinese mustard root, which makes me very very happy, because I grew up with so many types of pickled things for topping soup in the fridge.
XOXO,
Soph