French toast is something a lot of people enjoy for breakfast, and growing up, my mum even made it for lunch!
Originally, before freezers and Tupperware were invented, people would have stale bread often. Unlike these days, most people back then were very big on not wasting anything. And in some cultures, especially bread is almost regarded something sacred. Something you just.dont.throw.away! So naturally, they came up with ideas to revive stale bread. These days there isn't really an excuse to throw away bread, in my humble opinion- or even to actually have stale bread. But unfortunately, bread is still on top of the list of foods that are discarded most often.
So I guess making French toast more often will solve the problem partially.
French toast isn't the only way to use up stale bread, but it's one of the yummiest ways to do so, in my opinion. Back to this post's title, because isn't french toast cheap already? Of course, that depends on one's resources, location and other circumstances. Where we live, fortunately, bread is insanely cheap, since it's subsidized by the government, so that everyone can afford bread. But milk and eggs? Not so much. Fortunately, I found a way to substitute the eggs so that it lowers the cost at least a bit. Instead of using eggs, I use cornstarch, which turns out much cheaper than using eggs. Not only is it cheaper, your carbon footprint will also be lower than when using eggs-- win win. From a nutritional perspective it is probably a bit less healthy. But hey, we're not eating this daily. And besides, as with most western people, our intake of protein is more than we need anyway.
To make these French toast, we use about 1.5 big baguette, which is the bread that is eaten where we live, for our family of 4. I use about 2.5 cups of milk, and use a tablespoon of cornstarch for each half cup, so that makes 5 tablespoon. I also add either some vanilla sugar or ground cinnamon. Just slice the baguette, then dip each slice in the milk and starch mixture, then take it out (using a fork, preferably), and fry the slices on both sides. We prefer these with either honey or powdered sugar, but I'm sure other topping will be delicious too.
Other kinds of bread can be used interchangeably-- we just use baguette because it's easily available and most affordable. And of course, remnants of the milk can be used for other things, like porridges, pancakes/waffles etc. Make sure you don't throw the milk away because you wanted to avoid throwing out the bread. 😉
