Recipe: Savory French toast with garlic scape butter

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Egg prices might still be kind of a mess, but if you have a problem with blossom end rot on your tomato plants, you can get a little extra mileage out of those pricey hen fruits by turning their shells into calcium fertilizer. To free up the calcium in the shells to make them available to your plants, you have to soak the crushed shells in an acid like vinegar or lemon juice and then dilute the mixture before applying it to your plants (here’s a helpful and straightforward how-to).

Another way to justify paying high prices for eggs is to combine them with cheaper ingredients, like stale bread. You can usually find day-olds at bakeries for a deep discount, but you might even be able to score bread for no bread at all; a sandwich shop in my neighborhood bags the cut-off ends of their locally baked hoagie rolls for people to grab, first come, first serve. (Protip: you can make a stale baguette like new again by running it under the faucet, wrapping it in foil and then popping it into a hot oven for a few minutes. With this trick, I’ve successfully resurrected bread that was nearly hard enough to hit a home run.)

Here, French toast doesn’t just make the best fiscal sense, but adding a compound butter of garlic scapes and green garlic — byproducts of pruning and thinning your garden’s garlic patch — brings the dish into the land of exquisitely seasonal eating. And these springtime garden chores are important! Pulling smaller garlic plants before they form bulbs gives space for stronger ones to get bigger, and snipping off the scapes before they flower lets the plant focus its resources into the bulb, rather than going toward costly seed production. Best of all, they’re delicious.

Sure, you can make regular, sweet French toast, but making it savory opens a whole new world — you can add herbs to the custard, pile it with ham and cheese, or even top it with an additional egg (if you’re feeling flush with cash). Serves 4-6 (depending on the type of bread you use)

Note: this recipe leaves you with about ¼ cup of leftover butter — it’s wonderful on rice, pasta, mashed potatoes, vegetables or grilled fish, or you can wrap it and stash it in the fridge for about a week. If you don’t have a garlic patch of your own, you can find scapes and green garlic in farmers markets and better-stocked produce aisles.

Ingredients

4 eggs

¾ cup whole milk or half and half

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

¼ cup chopped fresh herbs (parsley, thyme, chives, and/or savory), plus more for garnish

8 slices (½ inch-thick) of day-old/stale crusty bread (if using a slender baguette, use 12 slices, cut on the bias)

2 tablespoons oil (for cooking)

Garlic scape butter

3 garlic scapes, chopped

2 green garlic shoots (ramps/wild garlic or baby leeks are fine subs)

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Instructions

1. In a wide, shallow dish, whisk together the eggs, milk, a few pinches of salt and a couple cracks of pepper until fully combined, and then mix in the chopped herbs. Lay the sliced bread in the mixture and let it soak up the custard while you make the garlic scape butter, flipping the bread halfway to ensure even soaking (this gives the bread a more luxurious texture, like bread pudding).
2. Chop the garlic scapes and green garlic as finely as you can (this is easier if you have a food processor or food chopper). Add the chopped garlics to the butter, add a few pinches of salt and pepper and mash it with a fork (or add the butter, salt and pepper to the food processor and pulse a few times) until fully combined. You can either scrape the compound butter into a ramekin or crock, or pile it onto a sheet of wax paper or parchment and roll it into a log.
3. Set a cooling rack on a sheet pan and stash it in the oven preheated to the lowest setting. Heat a tablespoon of the oil in a large skillet over medium heat, and add four slices of the soaked bread. Cook, flipping occasionally, until golden brown on both sides, about 8-10 minutes total. Transfer cooked bread to the oven to keep warm and repeat with the remaining oil and bread.
4. Top the warm French toast with pats of the garlic scape butter and a pinch of chopped herbs.

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