We challenged resident Bon Appétit supertaster Chris Morocco to recreate Hong Kong style french toast in the BA Test Kitchen. The catch? He'll have to identify what he's making with a blindfold over his eyes, letting each of his other senses guide the way.
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00:00 Hi, I'm Hannah, and I'm in the BA Test Kitchen
00:02 to have a super secret conversation about Chris Morocco.
00:06 Once again, we're putting Chris's
00:08 super taster abilities to the test.
00:10 This is Christina Cho's Hong Kong-style French toast.
00:15 I'm challenging Chris to recreate this dish
00:18 with all of the ingredients in just one day.
00:20 He'll be able to taste it, touch it, and smell it,
00:24 but at no point will he be able to see this dish.
00:27 At the end of the day,
00:28 we'll come back to see his final creation,
00:31 and I'll be the judge.
00:32 - Oh, it's giving me something.
00:47 It was there, and then it was gone.
00:49 Kind of eggy, waffley something.
00:53 Oh.
00:54 Got this very clearly defined square shape.
00:58 With this sort of slight crisp edge
01:01 that is kind of giving me a little bit of like a pancake vibe.
01:06 Sort of feels like two forms of sweetness.
01:10 There's sort of like a stickiness
01:12 that's kind of giving me a little bit of a syrupy vibe.
01:15 But then also there's this sensation of maybe
01:18 a little bit of powdered sugar.
01:20 It's maybe a pool of
01:22 what I'm assuming is butter.
01:27 Maple butter, honey butter.
01:29 So I've got these two square pancake-ish somethings.
01:35 Getting a little bit of peanut.
01:39 Mallory, you told them I [beep] hate peanut butter,
01:43 didn't you?
01:43 God, I hate that flavor.
01:45 It is like the flavor equivalent of a fart in a car.
01:49 I was so excited to see what was inside this.
01:53 Now, excitement gone.
01:55 Now, in terms of how you construct this
01:58 to get the peanut in the middle seemingly of the pancake,
02:02 that's a very interesting question.
02:04 Yeah, it's quite a generous coating
02:05 and quite an even coating of peanut butter.
02:08 It's pretty smooth and creamy.
02:10 I'm not finding pieces of peanut in here.
02:14 It's all pretty broken down.
02:15 Is there a fruit element here that I'm missing?
02:18 Or is this just a peanut butter pancake?
02:22 I think I'm good here.
02:25 There we go.
02:25 So, ingredients.
02:28 All right, so pancakes.
02:30 AP flour, baking powder.
02:32 I mean, half of this is just figuring out
02:34 how to make a pancake.
02:35 Baking soda, salt, granulated sugar.
02:40 For liquids, let's assume buttermilk, eggs,
02:46 butter, maple syrup, 10X sugar, confectioner's sugar.
02:50 Let's go for Smucker's creamy, natural peanut butter.
02:55 I think that's it.
03:00 I need a special piece of equipment here.
03:02 I need the mold or the cutter that is gonna allow me
03:05 to create that very crispy edged square pancake.
03:10 So, I don't know what words I need to use
03:13 for you to give me the thing I need.
03:15 Somebody's gonna shop for these ingredients
03:17 and then I will have my first shot at the dish.
03:19 [upbeat music]
03:22 All right, so this is gonna be my first attempt at the dish
03:26 and I have my ingredients here
03:28 and as ever, it doesn't look like nearly enough.
03:31 First and foremost, my question is
03:34 what's up on that mold, Mallory?
03:36 That's all you're giving me?
03:42 - Those are the square molds I have.
03:46 [metal clanging]
03:48 - You made me do this.
03:52 This is your choice.
03:53 I don't know how you're making frigging square pancakes
03:58 without a square.
04:00 There you go.
04:01 If you don't use something like that
04:03 to mold those pancakes, what are you doing?
04:05 I literally don't know what this means.
04:08 Is it really obvious that I'm just being a dingbat?
04:13 Ugh, God.
04:15 Feels like the peanut butter is sandwiched
04:18 in a distinct layer between two halves of batter,
04:23 if that makes sense, right?
04:25 If you take the mold away and all you have is a skillet
04:30 or a pan of some sort,
04:33 you're introducing batter potentially in a freeform way.
04:37 The logical conclusion is you're gonna end up
04:39 with a circle, right?
04:42 Is it something that you have to bake
04:45 and then cut pieces out of?
04:47 How do you do that, though?
04:48 If I were to put it in a baking dish of sorts, right?
04:53 I'm not gonna be able to get that pancake out.
04:55 Just have the surface,
04:58 the perception of the edge of the pancake.
05:00 Parchment paper or some other way
05:03 of creating a sort of nonstick surface.
05:05 We are barking up the wrong tree
05:07 in terms of square mold in a skillet.
05:11 You're saying you do not have any kind of special tools
05:15 to make this.
05:16 Is there a world in which that's some kind of
05:23 laminated French toast kind of thing?
05:25 That I was just missing the crust of the bread?
05:30 But if it's that, I don't have the right ingredients.
05:33 I'd probably ask for regular milk or cream.
05:37 I would ask for sliced white bread.
05:41 Maybe I would ask for even a little bit of vanilla.
05:44 So, got a fresh direction.
05:48 So we're gonna make French toast.
05:50 Are the crusts cut off to kind of square them off
05:54 still further?
05:55 Maybe I'll leave the crusts on for my first pass
05:58 and then we'll take a close look at that
05:59 for the next tasting.
06:00 All right, so, I meant to put that in the bowl.
06:03 It's fine, we're gonna assemble it in the pan.
06:07 All right, for two eggs, let's call it half a cup of cream.
06:10 Then, adding some granulated sugar.
06:13 I'm also gonna put salt.
06:14 I don't think I got cinnamon from the original dish,
06:17 but I might put just a tiny touch of vanilla.
06:20 Thin that cream out, thin that custard out just slightly.
06:24 Might do a half cup of milk.
06:26 Everybody here likes peanut butter?
06:28 So I'm doing this two ways.
06:35 One is a package that has the peanut butter in it
06:39 from the beginning,
06:41 sandwiched between those two pieces of bread.
06:43 The other one is just individual pieces of French toast
06:47 and I will just assemble the package
06:50 as it goes into the skillet.
06:51 Could've used a little bit of a bigger boat here,
06:53 but that's fine.
06:54 All right, so French toast is in the pan.
06:59 Got some butter in there.
07:00 Now, I need to put the peanut butter on the French toast
07:05 that's in the skillet, which is not super ideal.
07:08 It's becoming apparent.
07:10 The bread wants to tear a little bit,
07:12 so it's just something to probably reconsider for next time.
07:14 Probably go all in on assembling the French toast completely
07:19 before it goes into the custard, right?
07:21 I want color, but I don't wanna push the color
07:24 too far, too fast,
07:26 'cause ultimately this is a pretty sizable
07:30 kind of nugget of French toast here, right?
07:32 So I wanna cook the custard through before I flip it.
07:36 I don't wanna have to flip it multiple times.
07:38 Oh yeah, we're a little dark here.
07:40 Wow, we're just like falling apart all kinds of ways today.
07:43 Obviously a little bit more color than I want,
07:45 but part of it could just be that I put too much sugar
07:49 in the egg mixture, right?
07:50 Because sugar wants to take on color.
07:53 It wants to brown,
07:54 but taking it too far, you know, you get like this.
07:59 Wow, that is ugly.
08:02 So this French toast is the one that I laid
08:06 the peanut butter in pre-soak.
08:09 This one was post-soak.
08:11 Obviously seeing a major difference between the two.
08:14 The one that I didn't pre-assemble
08:16 just sat for too long in the custard.
08:18 That bread is very tender,
08:20 and it just kind of wanted to fall apart on me.
08:22 So we're gonna cheat this, right?
08:25 Gasp.
08:26 One of the mistakes I've made here
08:28 is I should have trimmed the crusts
08:31 before I proceeded with the recipe,
08:34 and just started out with something kind of closer to this.
08:37 I just wanna kind of get like a little bit
08:39 of like butter meltage.
08:42 So I've got some maple syrup.
08:43 I recall kind of getting the sensation
08:45 of a little bit of powdered sugar on there.
08:47 I feel like for like a little visual finish.
08:50 So here's my first attempt at peanut butter French toast.
08:54 It's not bad.
08:55 I still think like there might be like a larger story here
08:58 in terms of like, you know,
08:59 some other potential ingredients.
09:01 But from a technique perspective,
09:03 like I think I feel pretty good now
09:06 having worked through it a little bit.
09:08 All right, so time to give myself some scores.
09:10 First up, ingredients, 80%.
09:13 Could the syrup be a fruit syrup
09:15 to work off of the peanut butter?
09:18 That's like, I think the main thing
09:20 that I'm really stuck on.
09:21 Technique, I'll give myself an 85.
09:23 Appearance, 70%.
09:26 Maybe my edges look a little bit weird.
09:30 Maybe the 10X is incorrect.
09:32 Taste-wise, maybe I would give myself a 75.
09:36 All right, here are my actual scores.
09:39 Okay.
09:42 So ingredients, I've got actual, 79.
09:45 Technique, 80. Appearance, 81.
09:48 Taste, 84, for a total of 81.
09:53 For the second tasting,
09:54 I'm thinking really clearly about size of the French toast.
09:59 I'm thinking about toppings.
10:01 Some things to think about
10:02 and just a lot riding on that second tasting.
10:13 All right, so we're looking at size.
10:16 Palm length, palm width.
10:19 So I'm not detecting any 10X on the plate.
10:27 I've got melted butter and then I've got our syrup.
10:31 It's really funny, you know?
10:32 It's like, it's maybe got a maple aspect to it,
10:36 but it's got something else going on in there.
10:39 The flavor feels very muted to me.
10:43 If anything, it just tastes like you took a little jam,
10:47 you took a little maple syrup, boom, boom, boom,
10:50 mix them together.
10:51 Maybe the play here is we just need to take
10:54 some sort of jelly or what have you,
10:57 put it in with the syrup, kind of melt it down,
10:59 and see how it tastes.
11:01 My custard is probably too sweet, I will say that.
11:04 Like, this feels like a little bit more
11:06 of a neutral custard.
11:07 I'm gonna pull back the sugar,
11:08 but that's just kind of a detail.
11:10 So I think we can maybe safely cross out pancakes.
11:17 Oh yeah, raspberry jam with the seeds.
11:21 That's all you've got?
11:22 Unopened blueberry, which is also moldy,
11:27 you know what I mean?
11:29 It's like, you know what, maybe you keep that.
11:33 My best guess is that it was a little syrup,
11:37 a little grape jelly, boom, bada boom.
11:39 Now it's not peanut butter French toast,
11:41 now it's like PV&J French toast,
11:43 and how much cuter is that?
11:45 And if you're telling me that's not the world
11:48 we're living in, I don't know where we are.
11:50 So what, we take 10X, the confectioner's sugar, out,
11:54 and that's gonna be some game changer.
11:57 Custard, gonna make slightly less sweet.
11:59 I still wasn't getting any cinnamon from it, I will say.
12:02 If it's in the custard, it feels like
12:04 a pretty inconsequential amount,
12:06 so I'm gonna leave it out.
12:07 Vanilla I feel a little better about,
12:10 but yeah, just a little less sweet, I think, mainly.
12:13 Got a plan, and let's make it happen.
12:16 Here we go, last attempt.
12:17 This one's for the judge.
12:19 All right, so I got eggs, I've got cream,
12:21 I've got half cup of milk, I've got vanilla, salt,
12:26 little granulated sugar.
12:31 The consistency kind of returns to that of like,
12:34 maybe about heavy cream, just slightly looser.
12:37 Pre-trimming the bread, peanut butter before.
12:41 I really like the way the peanut butter fused
12:44 those two pieces of bread together,
12:46 and I love the way it then soaked.
12:49 It's just a little bit cleaner of a workflow.
12:52 Sandwiching them together, so now we're soaking.
12:57 This type of bread, it's very easy to over soak,
13:01 'cause it'll just fall apart on you.
13:04 I'm going a little lower and slower
13:08 with regards to cook time,
13:10 just a little bit easier gauge on doneness.
13:12 Still a touch more color than I'd like,
13:18 but I think it's okay, I don't know,
13:20 it just kind of wants to get dark, you know?
13:22 Just about there, yeah.
13:26 Back from the stove, color's good, not bad.
13:32 Little maple syrup going on there,
13:35 and I mean, I don't know,
13:36 I guess that's just like where we're leaving it.
13:39 I don't feel overwhelmingly confident,
13:41 but I mean, relative to where we started off today,
13:44 just to draw your attention back to the cookie cutter
13:48 that I destroyed in an effort to prove some kind of point
13:52 that has now been completely lost,
13:54 yeah, I think we've come a long way,
13:56 but I don't know that we're like there.
13:58 I don't know that we stuck the landing on this one.
14:01 Previous actual score for ingredients was 79.
14:04 Let's call this 82.
14:07 Technique was 80.
14:09 It's hard to know what exactly I was being penalized for.
14:12 I'm gonna stay at 80.
14:13 Appearance, I was at an 81.
14:16 Maybe we're at an 85.
14:17 Maybe the 10X was working against me there.
14:20 Taste, 84, we'll taste this shortly.
14:23 I still feel like, yeah, like 85,
14:25 something right around in there.
14:27 Hannah's gonna come in and clarify some things for me.
14:30 Hannah's a tough critic, but we'll see what she has to say.
14:34 - Hey, Chris.
14:34 You look a little defeated.
14:37 [laughing]
14:39 May I present to you Christina Cho's
14:43 Hong Kong-style French toast.
14:45 - Oh.
14:46 The muted syrupy thing.
14:50 I don't think I would've gotten sweetened condensed milk
14:53 in a thousand years.
14:54 - You beat me to the punch.
14:55 - This is why like seeing food is helpful sometimes.
14:59 - So what bread did you use?
15:00 - I used sliced white bread.
15:02 - Standard sliced white bread.
15:03 - Standard sliced white bread.
15:04 - Would you be able to take a guess,
15:06 now that you know that this is Hong Kong-style French toast,
15:09 what kind of bread this would be?
15:10 - Milk bread.
15:11 - Yes.
15:12 Stale, day or two old milk bread.
15:15 - What it presented as was a pancake.
15:19 - Square pancake, obviously.
15:23 What's inside?
15:24 - I have just peanut butter.
15:25 - Okay.
15:26 I'll give you peanut butter,
15:27 but what kind of peanut butter did you use?
15:29 - I don't know.
15:31 The kind that tastes like [beep]
15:33 and is made from peanut.
15:34 - Natural?
15:35 - Like every other one.
15:36 - Yeah.
15:37 - No, stop it.
15:37 Peanut butter is amazing.
15:38 You did two thin slices,
15:41 pressed together, pressed removed.
15:44 This is actually a book-ended piece of thick milk bread.
15:49 And you're slicing it just until the end
15:52 without going all the way through.
15:54 - Okay.
15:54 - What is the custard?
15:56 - Egg, milk, heavy cream, sugar, salt,
15:59 touch of vanilla.
16:00 - This is far simpler.
16:02 Egg, milk, touch of salt, dash of cinnamon.
16:05 - I did not get cinnamon.
16:07 I was looking for it.
16:08 - It looks good though.
16:09 Did you use just a standard pan?
16:12 - Little butter, regular skillet.
16:13 - Okay.
16:14 No lid?
16:15 - No lid.
16:16 You need a lid?
16:17 - You need a lid.
16:18 To achieve that custardy middle,
16:20 - Interesting.
16:21 - You're relying on steam to help you
16:23 cross the finish line.
16:24 - Okay.
16:25 - So ingredients, you gave yourself an 82
16:28 and I gave you an 81.
16:30 There are some key differences in the type of milk bread
16:33 and obviously the telltale condensed milk drizzle
16:37 versus the maple syrup.
16:38 Technique, you gave yourself an 80.
16:41 I'll give you an 85.
16:43 You're cooking it in a pan.
16:44 You're not using a lid.
16:45 - I didn't use a lid.
16:46 - Yeah.
16:47 You're using two slices of bread.
16:48 It's actually one slice.
16:50 - Butterfly.
16:51 - Butterfly, yes.
16:52 But you got the peanut butter in,
16:54 you soaked the bread in the custard.
16:56 Like these are pretty solid points that you did address.
16:59 So I'll be generous there.
17:01 Appearance, you gave yourself an 85.
17:04 I'll give you a 92 because other than
17:07 the dark amber maple syrup versus the condensed milk,
17:11 it looks very much alike.
17:13 Okay, so for taste, you gave yourself an 85.
17:16 So let's see how I would score you.
17:19 - Original first?
17:20 - Original first.
17:21 Take one of these.
17:23 - Seriously?
17:23 I have to have a middle piece?
17:24 - Yes.
17:25 - I'll have a middle too.
17:26 It's so good.
17:30 - Wow.
17:33 - You eat almond butter.
17:34 - Totally different animal.
17:35 - Stop.
17:36 - The only thing I can taste in all of them is peanut.
17:40 - Is it peanut butter?
17:41 I can't taste the peanut butter at all.
17:45 [laughs]
17:46 Can you?
17:47 - Yeah.
17:48 - It's like just brushed on the top.
17:51 - Yes.
17:52 - So it like, you know, it appears.
17:53 - Gossamer thing.
17:54 - Yeah.
17:55 - You also took your bread farther,
17:57 the caramelization, and I taste it.
17:59 Touch bitter, which isn't necessarily unpleasant
18:04 against the maple syrup.
18:05 - The cook on this is like perfect.
18:07 - Yeah.
18:08 For taste, you gave yourself an 85.
18:10 I would give you an 82.
18:13 - Fair.
18:14 - Because maple syrup does have such a strong identity,
18:18 flavor-wise.
18:19 It kind of masks everything else that's going on.
18:22 It's just taking away from any peanut butter
18:25 that is actually in there, if there's any in there.
18:28 Not bad, it's just not this.
18:30 - Yeah, totally.
18:32 - Often the simpler ones are more difficult
18:34 to really nail because there's nowhere to hide.
18:37 - Nope.
18:38 - But you did a great job.
18:39 You gave yourself an 83 total,
18:41 and my score for you is actually an 85.
18:44 - What?
18:44 - I know, I can't believe it.
18:45 - Is that the right one?
18:47 I was ready to take the loss, honestly, this morning.
18:50 - Great job, Chris.
18:50 You actually managed to come out on top.
18:52 - Nice, thank you.
18:54 - Yeah.
18:55 - I know it takes a certain kind of person
18:56 to look back at today and be like,
18:57 I think that actually went pretty well.
18:59 [laughing]
19:01 These ingredients were simple.
19:02 The dish was pretty simple.
19:04 The details mattered.
19:06 Every component matters that much more
19:09 the fewer ingredients there are.
19:10 So the chips were stacked against me on this one.
19:13 For anybody out there who really doesn't like peanut butter,
19:16 especially in sweet applications,
19:19 I hear you, I see you, I feel you.
19:21 You're not alone.
19:22 I can't stand it when it goes sweet,
19:26 and I find most peanut butters really lean on sweetness.
19:30 I don't love peanut in that creamy peanut butter form.
19:34 I just find it's a very cloying,
19:36 very oppressive kind of flavor.
19:38 It just gets in there, it coats everything,
19:41 and it tastes so good.
19:43 [Music]