If you know me, you know my favorite food: French Toast. wherever I go, I order it, and I semi-regularly fire up my griddle to fry up my own custard-filled slices. Recently, I admitted to my wife that if I could eat French Toast every day, I'd do it.
My French Toast obsession is, in a way, an effort to recreate a core part of my childhood when my mother would make her ridiculously sweet and wonderful cinnamon French toast. I'd eat the slices as fast as she could cook them, only stopping when my mother decided I'd had enough. Decades later, I realize that I've still never had French Toast just like it. My mother's recipe, though unsurprisingly steeped in sugar, cinnamon, and butter, still seemed unique.
I decided to make a special batch for Mother's Day, but as close as I could to the style and taste of my mom's recipe.
Like many others, I've been increasingly turning to ChatGPT and Gemini for recipes and cooking advice. They're generally on the money. However, for this effort, instead of asking, "Best French Toast recipe," I wanted to somehow convey the essence of my mom's old recipe, while updating it for modern tastes and diets. Here's the prompt I fed to both Gemini Pro and the free version of ChatGPT:
I grew up eating my mother's cinnamon-sugar French toast. It was delicious but probably terrible for me. Even so, ever since then, I've been trying to recreate that glazed, crispy, sweet outside on my French toast. I often use brioche bread, but my mom just used regular slices. In any case, I want the best recipe to help me recreate that feel and taste without, for instance, burning sugar on my grill.
As you can see, it was short on details and long on feelings. I made sure to note the cinnamon-sugar essence, but also my need to avoid a lot of burnt sugar smoke I'd experienced in some of my previous efforts.
AI chefs show me the way
The two sets of instructions that came back are quite similar, and I was impressed by how both understood my desire to create something special and possibly crispy without burning the all-important sugar. You can see the initial results below.
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I'm not gonna lie, ChatGPT did a better job of whetting my appetite by including a selection of delicious-looking French Toast image samples (two came from The Food Charlatan).
On the other hand, Gemini's no-nonsense approach got right down to the business of which bread to use (and why) and then the recipe for the custard (egg, milk, and vanilla mix).
Gemini also properly noted that I was looking for the "Brulee" approach and offered pretty straightforward steps, including drying the bread out in a low-temp oven before cooking, and a drop of neutral oil to lower the chances of the butter smoking.
Gemini recommended I sprinkle some sugar on after browning the toast, and then watch carefully for it to melt properly.
ChatGPT's method was somewhat different. First of all, it actually told me how much sugar to use and had me premix it with the cinnamon on a flat plate.
It also — and here's where my interest grew — had me brown each slice, briefly remove and dip each side in the sugar mix, and then return them to the griddle.
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This method immediately appealed to me because I knew I wouldn't want to be spreading sugar all over the griddle. Instead, I had full control.
Interestingly, both Gemini and ChatGPT methods recommended one to two minutes on each sugared side to achieve the crispy glaze.
I found that, one, I didn't have enough butter on the griddle, and two, 2 minutes wasn't enough to melt the sugar. I could've raised the temp, but then I risked burning the sugar.
In the end, I used the ChatGPT recipe (except for the bread-drying method and that drop of avocado oil), though I doubled the eggs, milk, and vanilla because I had twice as many bread slices. While I had mostly brioche bread, I did supplement with a few pieces of plain bread. I recalled ChatGPT telling me, "Yes, brioche is great—but standard sandwich bread works very well here."
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Turns out, ChatGPT was right. In fact, those slides came closest to recreating my mom's French Toast. Each slice was sweet, crunchy, and sort of magical.
I'm sure Gemini's recipe would've been good, too, but I did not want to deal with that sugar mess, and sprinkling sugar would've resulted in an uneven crisp coat. Whereas the dip into the sugar plate put me in control. Also, I'm surprised that despite Google's wealth of online imagery, it did not try to entice me with any delectable images of French Toast.
Overall, it's just another example of why people are increasingly turning to AI for guidance on core life tasks. Platforms like Gemini and ChatGPT are so good at not just understanding the basic question but also the context and intention behind it.
I think my mother would be proud.
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