"I want to eat your candles!" is what I've heard a lot recently - and it's usually when customers hear about my Pistachio Cream and Japanese Milk Bread Candle.
So I developed a recipe where you can eat something that tastes like my candle: Hong Kong Style French Toast with a Pistachio Condensed Milk. Hong Kong style French toast is a popular breakfast/dessert. It's a peanut butter sandwich on Japanese milk bread that is deep fried and then topped with condensed milk. For this recipe, I substituted the peanut butter with sesame butter and infused the condensed milk with raw pistachios. It is labour intensive and I would set aside around 5 hours for this.
I first followed this recipe for the Japanese milk bread: kwokspots.com/japanese-mil...
While it's rising, you can start on the pistachio condensed milk.
You'll need: - raw, already hulled pistachios (if they're not hulled, you can boil them for 5 minutes to get rid of the excess shell and salt)
- powdered sugar
- condensed milk
- a blender or food processor
- whole milk
First, toast the pistachios in your oven at 325 degrees for 5-8 minutes to help to release the oils. Once you take them out, put them into a blender/food processor and pulse for around 5-10 minutes. You will need a powerful blender, and will need to constantly scrape down the sides of the blender. At first the pistachios will look like sand, but keep blending it and it will turn into a paste. It will start turning into paste you can start slowly adding some powdered sugar as well as some whole milk to get it more liquidy.
Pour the paste into your condensed milk and mix it until you get the consistency you want. I preferred a thicker consistency because I really like pistachios. I considered straining the paste into the condensed milk but I like the chunks and I feel like it's a waste to not eat the actual nuts and just eat the nut oil. Refrigerate and set.
Ingredients to make the Hong Kong toast:
- sesame butter
- egg
- fresh vanilla
- milk
- corn oil
- fresh bread
Once your bread is done (and has been resting on a cooling rack for an hour to absorb the moisture) you can slice it and start coating each side with some sesame butter. You can buy this in the organic sections at the grocery store or make it from scratch. Black sesame is my preference but white sesame is ok too. I stole this idea from this restaurant near me, called Sunny's Chinese. They're on the michelin guide too. I used this sesame paste:
In a separate bowl, mix up two eggs, vanilla extract, and a splash of cream. I used fresh vanilla beans for this. Start heating up a pan on low-medium with corn oil to shallow fry the sandwich. While that's heating up, coat the sesame butter sandwich in the egg mixture. Then shallow fry all sides, about 3~ min per side. You'll end up with something that looks like this: Finish by using your pistachio condensed milk and optionally use a sieve to dust some powdered sugar over it.