No eggs needed for this easy vegan French toast – just a few simple ingredients for a real breakfast favourite!

On the surface Phil and I don’t really have a lot in common.  I like to think that those differences give us different perspectives and something to talk about!  We each have our own strengths and they mostly seem to compliment each other.  Even when we met his love of food didn’t come anywhere near close to matching mine.  He was a stalwart of the ‘open a frozen packet and put it in the oven’.  Cooking from scratch was a VERY rare occurrence.  A long way to the vegan meal prepping man he is today.  And I’ve always been beyond appreciative when anyone cooks for me – especially breakfast.  During the week breakfasts are such a blurry rush.  But at the weekend we get to slow down a little, at least for breakfast anyway!  Pancake Sundays have always been a sacred tradition in our house – which has now been slightly usurped by vegan French toast!

Phil’s Sunday breakfast ritual still involves whisking together a few simple ingredients – except now they also involve a bit of bread dunking!

I chose a sourdough for this French toast recipe but you can use whatever bread you’ve got.  And it’s the PERFECT way to use up any stale bread you’ve got lingering in a cupboard or bread bin somewhere.  As is this Bread and Butter Pudding.  I say all this like leftover, stale bread is even a thing for us!

One of the other ingredients I’ve used is Sweet Freedom’s Vanilla Syrup.  This is one of 2 new (and sadly limited edition) fruit based syrups from this lovely company who make the most gorgeous natural syrups, chocolate drizzles and spreads.  Honestly I love ALL their stuff.  Both of the new syrups (the other one is caramel) are available from Aldi if you’re in the UK.

How to make French toast

Largely the only difference between vegan and non-vegan French toast is the eggs.  There’s still milk, just a non-dairy type.  And there’s still all the wonderful sweet cinnamon spice and flavour.  But the eggs are what give the ‘batter’ density and make French toast what it is – crisp and crusty on the outside with a soft chewy inside.  So I did a little bit of testing with various egg replacements.  I tried different types of flour (some were grainier than others), ground flax seeds and chia seeds.  And the best combination turned out to be gram flour (also known as chick pea flour) and chia seeds.  It gave the batter a really good ‘thick’ quality – perfect for coating and soaking into the bread.

I let the batter stand for around 5 minutes after mixing just to give the chia seeds a bit of time to absorb some of the liquid and plump up.  Slice the bread quite thickly – a good 3/4 inch (2cm) thick.  Dunk in the batter, turning several times to completely coat.  Then gently pan fry in just a little bit of oil on both sides till you get that wonderful golden crust.

I’ve served ours with just some quartered strawberries and an extra drizzle of syrup for a bit of extra weekend decadence 😉

If you’re looking for more great vegan breakfast and brunch ideas we’ve got loads:

Vegan Scrambled Eggs – the final flourish for your traditional English fry-up

Vegan Pancakes – light and fluffy, we’ve been known to make a double batch just for the two of us!

Oatmeal Cookies – because I’m an adult so I get to have cookies for breakfast (it’s ok, these are mostly healthy)

Split Yellow Pea Breakfast Fritters – just in case savoury breakfasts are your jam

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