Hong Kong-Style French Toast (西多士) | Chinese Cooking Demystified

Fried French Toast! This is a classic dish at Hong Kong Bing Sutt, and pretty easy to whip up at home. It's a bit more crisp on the outside than western-style French toast, and also has the benefit of not needing stale bread. We'll cover three flavors of HK style French Toast:

* Classic Peanut Butter Stuffed French Toast (经典西多士)
* Ovaltine French Toast (阿华田西多士)
* Salted Egg Yolk Stuffed French Toast (咸蛋黄流心西多士)

0:00 - Introduction and History
1:27 - Classic HK French Toast Recipe
4:13 - Salted Egg Yolk French Toast Recipe
6:43 - Wrap Up & Eating

INGREDIENTS, PEANUT BUTTER OR OVALTINE TOAST
(Per toast)

- Chewy Bread, 3 slices
- Peanut Butter, 1 tbsp -or- Ovomaltine spread, 1 tbsp mixed with 1/8 tsp salt
- Egg, for coating, ~1 large mixed with ~1/4 tsp salt, per toast
- Oil, ~0.5-1 inch (~2cm), for frying
- For serving: condensed milk, golden syrup, or honey (also, Ovaltine powder for the Ovaltine one)
- For serving: knob of butter

PROCESS, PEANUT BUTTER OR OVALTINE TOAST

1. Spread peanut butter or ovomaltine spread over the two slices of bread (1:51)
2. Sandwich them together, then cut off the crusts (1:59)
3. Add salt to your egg, then thoroughly beat it (2:50)
4. Add your bread to the egg, allowing each side to soak for ~5 seconds (2:58)
5. Fry in 140C (280F) oil - getting each of the sides for ~10 seconds at first to seal them up. Then cook for 2 minutes. Anywhere between 130C-150C is ok. (3:13)
6. Flip, and continuously spoon the oil over the top in order to get it evenly golden brown. Once it's just starting to puff a bit, ~90 seconds, remove and toss on a baking tray. (3:25)
7. If doing the ovaltine toast, dust with ovaltine powder. Smother with condensed milk or your syrup of choice, add knob of butter, devour.

INGREDIENTS, SALTED EGG YOLK FRENCH TOAST

Bread, egg, oil, and butter/syrup for serving are the same as before. This will make enough filling for three French Toasts.

- Salted egg yolk (咸蛋黄), 2. The best are those from WHOLE salt-cured eggs, but the manufactured
sort are also ok. Homemade salt-cured yolks work, but you may want to grate them after steaming.
- Cantonese Rose wine (玫瑰露酒) -or- rice wine/sake, 1/2 tsp. Or skip in a pinch.
- Sugar, 20g
- Instant custard (吉士粉), 5g. Sub for half milk powder/half custard powder, or just use all milk powder
- Milk powder (奶粉), 10g
- Cornstarch (生粉), 1/2 tsp
- Coconut milk (椰奶), 20g
- Condensed milk (炼奶), 20g
- Water, 65g
- Gelatin powder (鱼胶粉), 1/2 tsp
- Butter, 30g

If you want yours to be more liquidy, cut out the cornstarch & knock the gelatin to 1/4 tsp.

PROCESS, SALTED EGG YOLK FRENCH TOAST

1. Mix the wine with the egg yolk, then steam for 10 minutes (4:42)
2. Mash the egg yolk until pasty, ~3 minutes. If using homemade salt-cured yolks (not whole eggs), grate before mashing (4:53)
3. Mix the rest of the ingredients except the water, gelatin, and butter (5:02)
4. Combine the water and gelatin powder over a medium-low flame. When dissolved, add the butter. When melted, add everything from step #3. Once combined, ~2 min, heat off, whisk in the mashed salted egg yolks. (5:12)
5. Set in the fridge for ~3 hours, or ~30 minutes in the freezer (5:37)
6. Fry the toast as before, but when assembling cut out a hole in your middle slice & add in the set salted egg yolk filling. (6:01)

______________

So yeah! Border between us and Hong Kong is still closed, so we weren't able to swing over there for footage. Had to rely on some vloggers for a couple visuals, so huge thank you to them.

One shot in the beginning was via Blondie in China's HK Coffee-Tea video (by far my favorite way to enjoy milk tea btw): https://youtu.be/mU6aXcKci1I

Another was via Miss Mina, from a very nice Hong Kong breakfast video: https://youtu.be/jQLzRP8UNUE

There was also a quick shot of a Bing Sutt via Mark Wein's Hong Kong food tour video - heavily recommended (though he does opt for chili on literally everything like he's from Hunan haha):

https://youtu.be/qhPVJ6ChwDY

And lastly, the shot of the runnier salted egg yolk was via Alfred Chan. Just found him researching this video - he's an HK photographer with a lot of cool content. If you speak Cantonese, definitely check him out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyCEae78e-E

And check out our Patreon if you'd like to support the project!

http://www.patreon.com/ChineseCookingDemystified

Outro Music: คิดถึงคุณจัง by ธานินทร์ อินทรเทพ
Found via My Analog Journal (great channel): https://youtu.be/GHaL5H-VYRg