Few chefs are more universally renowned and beloved than Jacques Pépin. While the French chef has worked in top restaurants, cooked alongside Julia Child on TV, and won many awards, he’s not too fancy for a brilliant hack. Case in point: Pépin’s mind-blowingly simple way of making French toast. It only requires two ingredients — bread and ice cream. (Yes, really!)
The technique, posted in a video by “American Masters” on PBS in 2022, is absolutely ingenious. We’re not sure why it’s currently trending on social media, but we’re happy to discover the tip — even if it’s years later.
Pépin calls it “ice cream French toast” because the only two ingredients are bread and melted ice cream. Instead of dipping bread in a mixture of eggs and milk, Pépin melts some French vanilla ice cream on a plate by putting it in the microwave for 15 seconds. Then, he soaks a slice of bread in the melted ice cream until it’s fully saturated and ready to cook. The key is making sure the bread absorbs as much of the melted ice cream as possible.
From there, he cooks the French toast the way you normally would — with some butter in a frying pan over low heat for a couple of minutes on each side.
“I made my French toast here with the vanilla ice cream,” Pépin says in the video. “But of course, the beauty of it, you can do it with strawberry ice cream, chocolate ice cream. It would be a bit different for a French toast.”
After a few minutes, Pépin flips the French toast. Then he tops it with a little bit of maple syrup and some banana slices, and serves it right on the plate with the remaining melted ice cream.
The recipe has been spotted all over Instagram, and creators have taken it a step further by melting an entire carton of ice cream and dipping a slice of bread into it instead of using a plate.
“That is ingenious! No need to beat eggs; just dip into thawed ice cream!” wrote one commenter. “This is such a great idea!” said another.
Now all that’s left for you to do is to decide which flavor of “ice cream French toast” you want to try first!