Ree Drummond's Favorite Cinnamon Toast Is All About The Broiler
Sometimes the simplest-seeming foods are the ones that no one can agree on. Pizza is the perfect example. A dish of dough, sauce, and cheese is as basic as you can get until you start getting into the nitty-gritty details, which passionate cooks inevitably do. Get two pizza chefs in a room with one another (or, even more daunting, two hobbyists who dedicate all of their free time and expendable income to studying the art of pizza), and chances are they'll disagree about the best way to do, well, everything.
The same can be said about even something like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Try serving a toddler a strawberry jam and peanut butter sandwich on wheat bread when they're used to eating grape jelly and peanut butter on white bread, and you might as well have shown them a video of their favorite teddy bear going down the garbage disposal. We've noticed the same sort of passionate specificity when it comes to making cinnamon toast. This creative spiral take on cinnamon toast had TikTok smiling earlier this year, and actress Jennifer Garner took to Instagram to share her cinnamon toast recipe, which featured bread that's actually griddled in a cast iron skillet. Now, we know The Pioneer Woman Ree Drummond loves her cast iron skillets, but something tells us that she might have a bone to pick with Garner's recipe — for Drummond it's broiler or bust when it comes to cinnamon toast.
Broiler works best
"There's a right way and a wrong way to make cinnamon toast," Ree Drummond said in a blog post on The Pioneer Woman featuring her recipe for cinnamon toast that doesn't involve a toaster. For those who grew up eating a pretty standard, easy cinnamon toast (spread toasted bread with butter, sprinkle on cinnamon and sugar, enjoy), Drummond has bad news. "This is so wrong," she says of the technique. Instead, Drummond changes up both the topping and the cooking method.
To start with, she takes softened butter and mixes the sugar and cinnamon right into it, until it makes a paste. She also has a couple of secret ingredients she adds to the topping. She spreads this mixture over slices of bread, bakes them, and finishes them under the broiler. The result? A piece of bread that's toasted through with melted butter and cinnamon sugar saturating each bite, along with a crispy, caramelized top thanks to the quick broil. You can watch how she makes it in her "Cin Toast" Instagram highlight. You have to be vigilant when the toast is under the broiler, because sugar burns really quickly, but take it out at the right time and you've got a treat so tasty, Drummond claims her husband Ladd "eats a hundred pieces at a time."