If you grew up with eggy, floppy French toast, it’s time for an upgrade.

Let’s face it, French toast could be better. It often comes out as soggy, wet slabs or it’s dry and bland. For years, Christopher Kimball has been in pursuit of a better way to make French toast. His solution? Add a little semolina flour to the soaking mixture.

Semolina flour is made from hard durham wheat. It’s more coarsely milled than white flour and can withstand greater levels of hydration. It commonly is used in fresh pasta, but can veer sweet or savory. We use it in our Ricotta-Semolina Cheesecake to keep the dessert from being overly wet, and in our savory Moroccan Semolina Flatbreads, which have a texture that’s somewhere between cornbread and an English muffin.

So why add it to French toast? Chris challenged our kitchen to develop a French toast based on testing he had been doing at home with baked goods like waffles and pancakes. He’d found that a little semolina flour gave baked goods a crispy exterior without drying out the inside. After several rounds of testing, the kitchen team found that just a couple tablespoons of semolina flour in the soaking liquid produced the custardy interior and crispy crust we’d been searching for.

The best French toast is toasted twice

Bread choices can be polarizing when it comes to French toast. Ultimately, the recipe developers landed on two options: thick-cut slices of a sturdy, Italian loaf, or a softer bread like challah. This recipe offers instructions for each, but the one thing everyone could agree on is that you’ve got to toast the bread. Slightly stale bread is ideal for French toast (and certainly can work here as neat food-waste solution) but if you have no stale bread on hand, the quickest way to a better French toast is to dry the bread yourself. Just a few minutes in the oven will do. Alternatively, you can leave the sliced bread out uncovered overnight. A slightly dried-out bread will absorb more of the soaking liquid without falling apart.

In pursuit of a crispy crust

While developing this recipe, the kitchen found that French toast made with semolina flour absorbed more soaking liquid than batches made without it. Semolina flour works like magic in this recipe, allowing the interior to remain custardy while the outside gets crispy. To make the best French toast, the semolina flour, eggs, sugar, and cream are whisked together and left to sit for 10 minutes so the flour can hydrate.

But there’s a second secret behind the crust. A tiny amount of sugar, sprinkled on each side of the French toast just before it hits the pan aids with caramelization. It isn’t so much sugar that it’s bordering on crème brûlée territory, just enough to help with browning and add some sweetness.

My favorite way to serve this is with warmed maple syrup (if you’ve never had warm maple syrup, it’ll change your life) and some softened butter.

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Willow Montana

Willow Montana is the Production Manager of Digital Media at Milk Street. Willow spends their days coordinating and planning video shoots, managing schedules and overseeing the execution of digital projects. They studied Baking and Pastry Arts at Johnson and Wales University and worked in restaurants while putting themself through six more years of college. They hold a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in English Literature and a Master’s of Fine Arts in Publishing and Writing. Willow is a firm believer in living a slow, quiet life and making things by hand. When they aren’t following the developers around with a camera at the Milk Street office, they may be found at home shaping loaves of sourdough, caring for dozens of houseplants and, occasionally, out in the wild at a punk rock show.