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If you can make a sandwich, you can make stuffed French toast. In fact, making stuffed French toast is a lot like making a sandwich.
The concept for stuffed French toast is simple: Make a sandwich with a yummy filling and dip the sandwich in an egg mixture or egg rich batter and cook as you would for other French toasts. The filling needs to be sticky enough that the two slices of bread stick together. Other than that, let your imagination soar.
While you can use anything, cream cheese mixed with fruit spread is a popular filling. We almost always use pastry fillings or combinations of pastry fillings.
We’ve taught classes and served stuffed French toast to participants. The following combinations have been popular:
Raspberry and Bavarian Cream
Cherry and Cream Cheese
Blueberry and Lemon
Pineapple and Cream Cheese.
These fillings are available here and in our store.
How to Make Stuffed French Toast
The first way is to make it on the griddle. Spread a filling between two slices of bread, dredge it in an egg batter, and pop it on a griddle. The process is exactly the same as making a single slice of French toast. Because the heat has to drive through two slices instead of one, it takes longer to cook. If the bread is becoming too crusty before cooking all the way through, turn the heat down. At a lower heat, it will cook more thoroughly.
Spread the filling or fillings on a slice of bread and add another slice to make it a sandwich.
Dip the sandwich in an egg mixture or tempura batter.
Place the sandwich on a hot griddle and cook as you would French toast, turning once.
Caramel Apple Stuffed French Toast
For this article, we chose apple filling and a caramel syrup to drizzle over it. But maple syrup works too. You could use apple pie filling instead of pastry filling.
When we made the caramel apple French toast in the pictures, we simply used a buttermilk syrup as an approximation of caramel syrup. When the acid is removed from the buttermilk in buttermilk syrup, you are left with a caramelly, almost butterscotch flavor that is fantastic. It’s a great choice for French toast.
Choose a buttermilk syrup here.
There are other choices. Vanilla Cream Syrup or Cinnamon Cream Syrup are good choices. A good cream syrup is very much like a caramel.
Caramel Syrup Recipe
You can make your own caramel syrup. This recipe works well.
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 1/4 cups milk
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup corn syrup
1 cup dark brown sugar
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon caramel flavor
Combine the cornstarch, salt, and sugar in a medium saucepan.
Add the milk and corn syrup. Cook and stir until the mixture boils and is thick and bubbly. Remove from the heat.
Add butter and caramel flavor. Stir until smooth. Thin if necessary with more milk.
Strawberry Cream Cheese Stuffed French Toast with Lemon Syrup
This stuffed French toast was a big hit in our classes. The common way to make stuffed French toast is to spread a filling between two slices of bread—make a sandwich—and then dip the sandwich in egg wash and cook it on the griddle. It’s very simple. But in this case, we were using fresh strawberries and didn’t want to heat them. So this is how you can make this stuffed French toast.
Wash and slice the strawberries. We used a strawberry slicer to get thin, even slices to fit in our sandwich. We sprinkled the strawberries with a teaspoon of sugar, no more.
Cook the French toast in single slices, not as sandwiches as we usually do for stuffed French toast. Keep the toast warm in a 200-degree oven.
Spread cream cheese pastry filling on half of the French toast slices. Add a layer of sliced fresh strawberries on the filling and top them with the other French toast slices.
Serve the stuffed French toast with warm lemon syrup.
Our lemon syrup mix has a tone just like a lemon pie. Folks went nuts over the combination of strawberries, cream cheese, and lemon. This is a must-try breakfast for a special occasion.
Deep Fried Stuffed French Toast
You can also make stuffed French toast by deep frying it. Instead of dipping your sandwich in an egg batter, use a tempura batter. Deep frying with a tempura batter makes your stuffed French toast light and crisp. It’s not as quick and simple, but in our classes, people always prefer this method.
Deep fry just as you would for donuts or French fries. Be sure to use a candy thermometer and keep the temperature in the 350 to 375-degree range. Remove the “sandwiches” with a slotted spatula.
We hope that you enjoy this scrumptious treat!
About the Author
Dennis Weaver has burned food from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Miami, Florida. He is the founder of The Prepared Pantry in Rigby, Idaho and the author of “How to Bake: The Art and Science of Baking” available as an E-book or as a Kindle book on Amazon. Dennis lives in Rigby, Idaho, with his wife, Merri Ann. They have five wonderful children and six beautiful granddaughters.