>>24420905I live in southern California and I can get basically any high quality tropical fruit pretty easily, you need to know which markets to go to but they're never very hard to find. The hardest fruits to find are things only popular in mainland china like Shanzha (yes I know hawthorn berries are nearly the same thing) and mangosteen. I've been looking for chinese red rice wine lees for nearly a year and genuinely can not find them anywhere. But fruits from anywhere else are generally pretty easy to find if you know where to look. You just don't know where to look if you think it's even semi difficult to get stuff like papaya and dragonfruit. I can get both of those at a local whole foods and those are the overpriced ones. Go to a Galleria market and you can find those for a couple becks at most.
>but french toast has a HUGE fucking ceiling in terms of bang for your buckEverything in this entire paragraph is completely deranged and insane. Most french toast in the US is made with actual eggs, I do not know a single person who has ever even eaten instant omelet mixture. There is no theoretical difference between european and american eggs except the sanitization procedures which barely affect taste in the modern day and the real important part is the chicken and how they were fed. There are varying ranged of egg quality and obviously the highest quality are the rarest to find. You get them at farmers markets or specialty grocery stores, the orangeness of the yolk is about how the chickens were fed and have nothing to do with the geography. In fact with the number of small local farms in the US it's easier to find high quality eggs than in Europe if you just do the minimum amount of effort to look.
Fresh brioche is also literally everywhere, it's one of the most popular breads on the planet and you can find it in any bakery. It doesn't have to be super expensive or require specially trained bakers, it's just very buttery but nothing else about it is special. It's not even the best bread for french toast because it's structure can't hold up to the custard. Walnut bread or challah are objectively better and any french pastry chef worth his salt would know to not use brioche in a french toast. There are not quality grades to powdered sugar, it's just very fine sugar and a starch anti caking agent. "homemade whipped cream" is a psychotic statement, it's fucking whipped cream. The only difference is where you source the cream, every restaurant uses gas whippers. The cream does make a major difference sure but again, it's not hard to source good cream if you know where to look. Vermont syrup is also basically the standard for any actual human. Again, I have literally never met people who use fake syrup and I know people who live in a trailer. Macademia nuts I'll give you but only because those are always expensive, they're almost always from hawaii though so there's not much of a quality scale.
As a side note the French are not good at cooking. All of their non pastry """cuisine""" is based on taking Italian dishes and adding fat and salt until they cover up the taste of their inferior produce. Italy has better fruits and vegetables just due to location, and the French unironically seethed about that so hard that they attempted to spread their garbage technique across the globe by labelling it as haute cuisine and tricking the uninformed masses into thinking that plating is more important than making food that is balanced and actually tastes good. The entire concept of haute cuisine was literally a cope by french chefs who couldn't handle that the rest of the world had more flavors than butter and black pepper. And french pastry is 99% ripped directly from other northern european dishes. Croissants are literally kipferls from Austria with more butter, madeleines are not good they are literally just tiny cakes with a stupid shape, and almost every other "french" pastry is a direct ripoff of something that had exist for 100 years already in Germany. The french deserve almost no credit for cuisine on a global scale, they are actively villains in the grand scheme of everything. And before you go "oh american food lmao here's a webm of some woman putting hotdogs and butter in oatmeal and calling it a stew" let it be known that that style of cuisine is a direct holdover from european immigrants into america. The overabundance of butter, flour, and salt with next to no other seasonings is literally a direct french cultural import.