Giada De Laurentiis' sheet pan lasagna was a smash hit, and her new sheet pan French toast is sure to be just as popular. Topped with dollops of lemon ricotta and a shower of chocolate chips and fresh fruit, it’s bringing all those springy, brunch-for-a-crowd vibes that couldn’t be more timely.
As the recipe developer behind Delish’s ultimate French toast recipe, I’ve spent hours in the kitchen soaking bread and meditating on the perfect French toast—and I was dead curious to see how Giada’s version would pan out (pun fully intended). So I tried it! Here’s my honest review:
About The Recipe
Giada’s sheet pan French toast seeks to answer the eternal question: how do you make brunch for a crowd without standing over the stove playing the part of short-order cook while your guests kick around alone in the living room? A common answer to this conundrum is the perennial French toast casserole, which typically requires an overnight soak and takes at least 45 minutes to bake, but Giada’s sheet pan version takes this one step further:
“You don’t have to worry about soaking the bread overnight to get all the flavors,” she says in the video on her website. So not only does this recipe solve the short-order-cook issue, it also requires zero planning ahead and just 25 minutes of bake time—you can make it start to finish in just 45 minutes.
French Toast Variations
French Toast Casserole
Overnight French Toast
Overnight Almond Butter-Banana French Toast
The biggest concern with eliminating an overnight soak is ensuring the bread is fully soaked. Giada solves this issue by cutting the bread into small pieces—one-inch cubes, to be precise— so they can hydrate faster (a higher ratio of surface area to interior means less time is needed for the eggy soak to reach the middle). Cutting the bread into small pieces does mean losing some of the custardy interior that’s so classic in typical French toast or French toast bake but Giada also has an answer for that: pockets of lemon-scented ricotta dolloped sporadically around the sheet pan.
“You know how the center is super gooey—this is where your gooeyness is,” Giada says in her video. This all sounded great in theory, and I was dying to see if it held up in practice.
While Giada teases this French toast recipe with a reel on her IG, I needed to go to her website, Giadzy, to get the actual recipe with ingredient quantities, bake time, etc. Spoilers: you will need to pay for a membership to get this recipe, but once you have it, you’ll have access to the full recipe as well as a video of her making it!
Making The Recipe
The recipe came together quickly and easily for me. I did notice a difference in order of operations between the recipe printed on the site and the video: while Giada instructs us in the video to first make the egg mixture, then make the lemon ricotta while the bread is soaking for its five minutes, the actual recipe reverse the two steps and starts with making the ricotta, instead. Since I was following the recipe, not the video, I found myself waiting around while the bread soaked. Not a big deal (it’s just five minutes!) and I took it as an opportunity to do some dishes, but this could be annoying to someone on a tight schedule.
I was nervous about the bake temp and time: Giada asks us to bake with the rack positioned in the top third of the oven at 425 for 25-30 minutes. The rack placement made sense to me—the bread is sprinkled with sugar, and I assumed the higher position was intended to promote a caramelization similar to what you might get if you were frying French toast in a pan. But I was still nervous about leaving anything to bake at such a high temperature for that long, so I checked after 20 minutes. Sure enough, it was almost done. When I pulled the sheet pan at 23 minutes, the tips of some of the bread pieces were almost burning. My oven is correctly calibrated (I always keep a thermometer hanging in it so I can be sure) but this is definitely a testimony to the fact that every oven bakes differently. I’d advise anyone making this recipe to check it early, just to be safe!
Once the sheet pan French toast was baked, I let it sit for the recommended five minutes before topping it with fresh fruit and serving myself. (Brunch for one on a Thursday morning, anyone?)
The Results
There was a lot to love about this sheet pan French toast. I liked all the crispy bits on the top, and I was surprised by how much I loved the pockets of melty ricotta, especially when I got a bite with the ricotta and the chocolate and the fresh fruit all together. I honestly didn’t get custardy inside-of-the-French-toast vibes from the ricotta, like Giada claimed, but I was a fan of it nonetheless.
I’m always thinking critically about anything I taste, so while I must emphasize that this was DELICIOUS overall, I did have a few notes of things I would do differently if I made it again. First, I would add a few tablespoons of sugar to the egg mixture, because, once you got past that layer of caramelized sugar on top, the actual “French toast” wasn’t sweet at all. This could have been due to the bread I was using: Italian, as per Giada’s specifications, instead of brioche or challah, both of which have an inherent sweetness that I typically prefer in a French toast. Regardless, I felt it could use just a tad bit of sweetness somewhere, so I didn’t feel the need to douse it in maple syrup.
Second, while the ricotta was a great touch, it did look a little split when it came out of the oven. It tasted great, but it didn’t look very appetizing. I think if I made this again, I would add the ricotta after the French toast had been baking for 15 minutes so it had enough time to warm through and get melty, but not get too hot.
These were just minor critiques, though—overall, if I was hosting brunch, I would definitely be making this. It’s the type of thing that you keep going back to snag little bites from, even after you’ve sworn you were stuffed and couldn’t possibly eat more. And isn’t that what a great brunch dish is all about?
