How did you come up with preparing a Christmas French Toast with Panettone? Well, dear friends, I always told you, and never hid, that I am a true sweet tooth! So, browsing through Instagram and Pinterest, I stumbled upon some French Toast recipes with Panettone. Some with too much egg in my opinion, others that used baking instead of pan-frying, and others more health-conscious that used coconut oil for cooking instead of butter. Then there are those who use the air fryer, but that’s another topic I don’t want to open here.

Returning to the choice of “unleashing” my greediness, I opted to use the classic and always delicious berries for the final garnish. This time I didn’t caramelize them like for the Pandoro Log with custard precisely to not further increase the calories of the dessert with Panettone that I’m proposing to you today.

The French Toast or Pain Perdu, translated from French means lost bread, is nothing more than the reuse of stale bread (which would have been wasted because it hardened) soaked with beaten egg with milk and a pinch of salt. You grease the pan with some butter and fry both sides until you create the classic golden crust of the French Toast! There are initial mentions in cookbooks already in Roman times where, however, the bread was only immersed in milk and then cooked. Of course, it wasn’t the French Toast we know today but a distant relative of it. It was then re-elaborated by the French cuisine which served it with game and meats because it wasn’t yet a sweet dish but a recycled bread. Widely spread throughout Europe under the name of golden soups.

We indeed learned, when I told you about Soups, Minestrone, and Zuppe in the recipe of Vegetable Minestrone with Pumpkin that the term suppe doesn’t only indicate soup or another broth, but it also referred to bread immersed in a liquid ingredient as in the French Onion Soup Recipe.

The French Toast was also proposed as tostées dorées but the version we all know today is the more recent one, most likely with American influences, since ingredients like cream, peanut butter, and sugar in the beaten eggs were introduced. As for spices, cinnamon, like in my case, nutmeg, ginger, and vanilla made their way in. In short, everyone has their own French Toast in every part of the world. So today I present my version, a simple, quick, and delicious recipe!

Before moving on to the recipe, the list of ingredients, and the doses needed to prepare the Christmas French Toast with Panettone, I want to tell you a small and short story. I often talk about my two grandmothers, Licia and Sandra, and my mom Roberta. They are the source from which I draw for many of my recipes. Well, this time I thought I did it on my own. I thought, in fact.

This morning I recorded the video recipe that you find below the first photo, uploaded the video to the YouTube channel, and sent it to my dad. My Paciccio replied like this: “This is good. Your grandmother Licia used to make them 30 years ago with sandwich bread and served them for breakfast with Nutella or jam!”

Did you get how Grandma Licia treated her grandchildren and relatives well? And I thought I discovered the recipe to recycle panettone in a greedy way. She was ahead 30 years ago, UNIQUE! I’m happy to think that I proposed one of her recipes again, even if unintentionally and unconsciously, it makes me really grateful to have had a grandmother like her in my life.

Below you will find other recipes for recycling panettone or recycling pandoro that I have proposed to you over the years. The most famous is undoubtedly that of the Log of Pandoro with Custard which surpassed 300,000 views between the YouTube channel, the reel on Facebook, or the video on Tik Tok.