Another Great Bread Pudding

Another Great Bread Pudding

I love this method for bread pudding because the unsoaked bread on the outside gives it a great contrast both in taste and texture to the creamy custard inside.  You’re going to love this version.  The rest of this post is mostly like the last one because there’s not much else to say.  You’re making bread pudding except instead of putting it in a pie pan you’re putting it into a bread bowl.  That’s the only difference.  But I wanted you to see what I originally had to say about bread pudding.

This is one of our all-time favorites.  A good, classic bread pudding is nothing like that crap you get in most Cajun restaurants, or any other restaurant for that matter.  America has gotten this fascination with overly sugared desserts to the point that nobody knows how to enjoy something that’s truly good anymore.  Everyone thinks that overly sweet means good.  I’ve seen it too many times where someone would brag about how wonderful some super death by chocolate diabetes volcano is, when what they really mean is that it’s so overly sweet they can’t taste anything else for days.  Ok, so that’s enough of my diatribe.

Anyway though, this is a fabulous bread pudding and it’s wonderfully easy.  It’s got a lovely crusty top and is perfect for breakfast or dessert.  In French it’s called ‘pain perdue’, which means ‘forgotten bread’.  And it’s meant to be made with bread that you’ve forgotten about and has gotten really hard.  And while we’re at it, a little note on the bread… this is meant to be made with more traditional crusty breads that are simple in composition and have lovely rustic, large, rough holes.  French baguette will never fail you, and there are some others like ciabata and some Italian rustic breads that are excellent.  What you can’t use though, is sliced sandwich bread.  That bread tends to not have any real character, and is really flat and lifeless.  Not to mention it just turns to complete mush when you soak it in batter.  So to me, this is the biggest failing of bread puddings you get out in the world.  They rely on the cheapest bread possible with absolute no flavor or texture whatsoever, and the final product suffers greatly for it.  So always always always use a good rustic crusty bread like a good baguette and you’ll be handsomely rewarded.

Now, on to the actual dish.  Bread pudding is very easy to make.  It’s basically a custard with bread soaked in it, or you can think of it as baked French toast if you prefer because the batter is almost the same.  I like to relate things to one another because cooking is a string of 1,000 unrelated things.  Most everything in cooking comes from a base of some kind and can be related easily to something else.  When you learn this method of cooking it’s a lot easier to picture things and you have an actual understanding of what’s going on.  And you can read recipes much easier than you ever could because you’re able to break down the components into their base elements.  That means you automatically know what dishes are supposed to look like even when you’ve never made them before and it means you’ll be much more likely to pull a good recipe out of thin air when you’re having to improvise.

So here’s our basic bread pudding.  We’ll be making some other variations that are also quite lovely but this is a great starter.  You’ll love it.  Control your own sugar content as you like it, but make it my way first and see if you don’t like that.  Then change it.

It’s impossible for me to say exactly how much batter you’ll need since I have no idea how big your boule is and how much you cut out of it.  So this is just a guess based off of what I needed.

Ingredients:

1 bread boule. A boule is one of those round loaves you see at the bakery in places like Whole Foods and Central Market. They’re very rustic and crusty.
6 C. whole milk.  This can’t be anything but whole milk.  You need the fat content.
5 large eggs
2 t. vanilla
2 t. cinnamon
1/4 c + 1/8c of sugar
1 t soft butter

Method:

  1. Hollow out the boule as shown in the video and make sure to leave enough space for it to not be too thin so you can reduce the leakage.
  2. Slice the bread and toast it in the oven at 350-F until it’s a medium brown.  You’ll probably have to turn it once to get both sides.
  3. Get a nice pie pan or any other type of wide pan.  You probably don’t want to use a loaf pan, but I suppose you could if you wanted.  Spread the butter inside the pan and coat it.  Then spread sugar on the butter.  This is preparing it like a cake pan.  The butter sticks to the pan, and the sugar sticks to the butter.  This keeps your pudding from sticking.  The sugar you use here is outside the listing above.  So you’ll need all of the sugar in the ingredients list for the batter itself, plus a little more to prep your pan.
  4. In a mixing bowl, mix all your other ingredients together.  The bread is probably still in the oven so it doesn’t go in yet.  But this is the batter so just throw it all in the bowl and beat it until the eggs are fully incorporated and you’ve got a fairly smoother mixture.  This is the time to adjust your amounts.  You can use as much vanilla, cinnamon, and sugar as you like.  So once you make my version, then feel free to adjust it to whatever you like.  The only important ratio is the 6 cups of milk to 5 eggs.  Everything else is just arguing over flavoring.
  5. Once the bread is out of the oven, put it in the hollowed out boule and mash it down with your hands as much as you can.  You’re trying to get rid of the space between the pieces.  You don’t want large pockets of custard in there, you want a consistent texture.  So mashing down the bread breaks it down and helps it fill in those gaps.
  6. Ladle the batter onto the bread until the boule is full.  Then let it sit so the bread can soak it up.  You want the bread to be full of batter.  You don’t want loose batter sitting around.  So give it some time, it may take an hour depending on how dry the bread is.  Keep doing that until the pan and the bread can’t take any more batter.  You may have to add the batter a little at a time at the end because it starts over flowing out of the boule.  That’s ok.  Take your time.  I said this was easy, not fast.
  7. Once you’ve added all the batter you can, just bake it on a sheet pan at 300-F until done.  It’s done when you can cut the top open with a knife and spread it apart and none of the liquid rushes in the fill the hole.  And don’t cook this too fast.  It’s a custard and they’re rather delicate.  So you’ll break the custard if you crank up the heat, and you’ll also risk burning the top because that bread is exposed and it’ll burn before the custard is set.  It’ll probably take 1-2hrs to finish.

Notes:

  1. Dried blueberries are also probably quite lovely.
  2. You could also flavor this with lavender by mixing lavender flowers with sugar for a couple weeks before and using that sugar in your batter.  It would be quite exquisite.
  3. If you have any other flavorings you could use those… like orange extract, or maybe just the smallest touch of almond extract.  Be careful with these though as they can overpower very easily, especially the almond.  I prefer the more basic bread puddings, but these variations are also quite nice sometimes.
  4. If you really don’t like how the boule leaks when you let it soak then let soak the bread in another bowl and then add it to the boule once it’s ready.  This way you can bake the boule as soon as the bread is added and it probably won’t have time to leak unless you’ve got a hole somewhere.

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