never made it but love it. Had a stale loaf of French bread, found this recipe, had a spare 30 minutes, and whipped it up with ease.
Modified by doubling recipe and throwing in 4 diced ripe bananas and a couple layers of chocolate sauce from a container used to make chocolate milk. So really a banana chocolate bread pudding. Also used brown sugar for most of the sugar.
Made a vanilla sauce to put on top—easy recipe
Amazing. Even the wife loved it and she’s no b pudding dan. Not too sweet, keeps well. Just microwave to heat
—and eat.
Next time I’ll throw some fresh diced banana on top and a little spritz of chocolate sauce to pretty it up.
I can’t eat it - too many carbs - but I made it up without a recipe for a large group and it disappeared even faster than the chocolate cake. Sugar, bread, eggs, butter, cinnamon. What could go wrong with tat?
We used to make it a lot but then we used to eat a lot more bread.
But if you really want to kick it up, don’t use old stale baguettes or similar bread.
Use old croissants or rich pastries. If you don’t have any, use brioche or challah. Throw in some rum-soaked raisins.
But make sure you use real crossants that were made with butter, not some supermarket version that was made with shortening. Because if you’re doing the latter, you may as well use the classic Paula Deen recipe for those stale Krispy Kreme donuts that you most certainly have around:
Break up the donuts and put them in a pan. Cover with sweetened condensed milk and bake until yummy.
I had a panettone someone gave me for Christmas. Surprisingly it wasn’t expired so I tossed it in the freezer a couple of weeks ago, defrosted it today to make a batch of bread pudding.
I love bread pudding. We make a regular variety, a chocolate coconut version, and even a mushroom medley savory version as a side dish.
I have used the Commander’s Palace recipe for 30 years as a base. Then modified based on what type of bread was available. I made one recently with leftover costco fruitcake which was really good. Made the fruitcake “light,” even people who claim to not like fruitcake, liked this.
A good bread pudding made out of (as mentioned) panettone, brioche or some other egg-rich bread can be absolute heaven. When they’re done just right, there’s simply nothing that beats it. Except maybe a Pavlova. Or Eton Mess. Maybe.
I’m with John and Adam, my favorite is with panettone (add dark chocolate). Krispy Kreme originated here, have a half-life of something like 10 minutes, and are often sold buy one dozen get one free, so that works decently well too. I cracked up the first few times i saw that on menus.
Yeah but they gotta be just right! First few I made years ago were disasters. I followed a recipe in the NYT cookbook and the result was just way too dry. Then I found some in Chicago at a French pastry shop. The lady wouldn’t give me her recipe so I kept buying some until I figured it out. After that I just made my own.
The key is to get it really custardy and to do that you need to make sure the bread is well and fully saturated and that there’s a little left over to encase the whole thing in custardy goodness.
Made a big batch.
Night 1 with hard sauce
Night 2 with hard sauce
Night 3 with vanilla ice cream
I had to freeze the rest today out of fear that Night 4 would be hard sauce AND ice cream.
I love regular bread pudding. But Charlie Trotter’s chocolate bread pudding is pretty amazing (but it is misleading to call it bread pudding as opposed to a decadent chocolate dessert). The “bread” is chocolate cake. Then add chocolate, cream, home made English toffee. If I had to choose I would probably choose a traditional one – but for anyone who likes chocolate, and has the time (which I realize many of us now have), the Trotter version is bound to please.