Ingredients: |
Ingredients: Solid stuff:
1 part stale bread*
Vanilla (beans or extract)
Butter (cold)
Nut/seeds (Pecan, walnut, flax seed, etc.)
Fruit (raisins or cranberries)
Sweetener (sorgum, honey, maple syrup, brown sugar, etc.)
Spices that go well with sweet things (cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, etc.)
Salt
Liquid stuff:
1 part Milk or milk-like product (rice milk, soy milk, etc.). Should be creamy, in my opinion.*
1 part Eggs*
Sauce:
Granulated sugar or liquid sweetener
Rum or sweet liquor
Butter
* So you'll have the amount of bread you'll need will be equal to the amount of milk you'll need, which will also be the same amount of the volume of eggs you'll have. So look in your fridge and see what you have the least of, and then coordinate the rest of your ingredients to this part. It's cooking chemistry!
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Directions: |
Directions:Warning: This recipe requires a lot of eyeballing ingredients. Read through the entire thing to get an idea of how much you think you'll need. Overall, the best way to look at this recipe is that you are conducting an experiment. You'll come out with something, and it will probably be edible. You may have to toss some of your ingredients because you made too much of one part and didn't have enough of another. But use your judgment. Preparatory remarks: To get you into the vibe of bread pudding making by eyeball, remember that is just pudding. Pudding is like gravy. It just is gravy with eggs and sugar. Gravy is just a liquid and some flour. In the case of bread pudding, the flour comes from old bread. After you re-hydrate stale bread, it serves the role of the flour. We then add eggs and sugar and you get bread pudding. The eggs get into the stale bread and serve as a glue to bind everything together. The sugar, of course, just makes everything sweet. So when you think of how much bread and milk-eggs you'll need, think. Prepare bread: Take the stale bread and if it's not sliced already (it's much easier if it was sliced before it went stale), then chop it up into bite-sized pieces. If you don't have stale bread, you can take regular bread and let it sit in an oven at less than 125 F or so to make it dry. It's important that it's dry all the way through, or else it won't soak up all of the pudding goodness you are about to make. Take the cold utter and spread it all over the bread chunks. I like to hold the stick in my hand and smear the butter over the bread. This may be messy, so be prepared. It's nice to use bread which was dense to begin with for this part. Stale wonder bread might not stand up to buttering. Alternatively, you can let the butter get to slightly room temperature and then it will spread easier. Prepare pudding goodness: Take the equal amount of milk and eggs and mix them together. You can eyeball this, it's just important not to have too few eggs. When in doubt, add another egg. The volume of the eggs and the milk should be about equal before you combine them. To make it extra fluffy, crack the eggs and separate the whites. Then whip up the whites until they are slightly foamy. But not really foamy (that will turn it into merange, and we're makin' puddin' here). Then combine the slightly-whipped egg whites, the egg yolks, and the milk, and mix it up. After you have the milk-egg base, you can add your solid things. A bit of salt is good here (maybe one pinch per cup of milk), but a little goes a long way. I would add the vanilla (actual bean innards are really good. You can also chop of the bean pod and put that in the mix, too. Use about one whole bean for every 4 cups or so of milk. Or whatever you think to give it a vanilla taste) here. Also, add enough sweeteners to make the liquid sweet. I personally don't like it too sweet, and you can always add more of the sweeteners on top before you bake it if you think you didn't add enough. If you add it on top before you bake, then you get a little extra crispy texture too, and that's nice. So you have vanilla and sweetener, you can also add something crunchy like the flax seed (ground or whole) and nuts and something that's tart like cranberries or something else that's sweet like raisins. You could even add something like ground coffee beans or coca nibs, which I think would go well with the vanilla. Also cinnamon is good. Go to town, this is your bread pudding and no one else has to eat it if they don't want to. So now you've got this mixture of milk-egg-sweetener-crunchy stuff, you can combine it with the buttered stale bread. Take a huge bowl and dump all the bread in it. Then pour the liquid into the bowl. If the liquid does not cover all the bread chunks, that's okay. Because the bread is chunky, there's lots of air pockets and the bread takes up more space than there is actual bread. As the liquid soaks into the bread chunks, the bread chunks will get cozy and the whole thing will shrink. This soaking will take a few hours. I would go out and take a walk. You've done a lot of work at this point, and no need to stay cooped up all day. After you've done something else for like 30 minutes, come back and stir up the mixture. Some of the bread chunks will be soaked through, and other chunks will still be rock hard. No worries. Stir it up so that some of the hard chunks are at the bottom and covered in the liquid and that some of the soaked chunks are on the top. Leave for another 30 minutes. Come back and stir again. Repeat this until all the chunks are pretty well soaked. At this point you might be asking, "Hey Rhett, why didn't you tell me how much milk-egg liquid to make? I don't have enough bread!" Or vice versa, maybe you have too much bread. Well, I have to say that you'll have to eyeball this one, too. Check your fridge and see what you have the least of, then plan accordingly. Anyhow, now we have our soaked bread mix. I would either cook it now, or let it sit overnight. Something tells me that soaking it overnight is a good thing. Let it sit in your refrigerator overnight, or, if you're adventurous, let it sit out. There will let a little more e. coli grow on it, but you're going to cook this at 250 F for a while, and that should kill all the bad stuff. To bake: When you're ready to bake, set the oven at 250 F or so. Put the mixture into a baking dish or a cast iron pan, or your favorite bread-pudding mold, and then you're ready to go. If you want, before you put it in the oven, add some more sweeteners to the top of the mixture. I put some sorgum on top of mine, and this crispified really well. Anyhow, put it in the oven and then at about 15 minutes check on it. Keep checking on it until it's golden brown on top. At this point, it's probably done. Cut a little piece out of the middle if you want to check. There shouldn't be any gooey un-cooked bread. Sauce: For the sauce, you'll make a thick butter-alcohol sauce that's sweet. First, get a sauce pan and put it on low heat. Add butter and let it melt. Then add the alcohol, but not so much that it dilutes the butter (about 1:2 alcohol: butter is enough, but you can do less alcohol). Then add enough granulated sugar to thicken the butter/alcohol. If you have one stick of butter, then add around a half-cut or a cup of sugar. It's a lot. But then you won't need much sauce! If you don't use granulated sugar, you can use honey or sorgum or something. But this won't thicken. In this case, you can use some corn starch or flour and thicken the sauce. If you do this, take a small dish and add some water and then add your flour. Mix it up so that all the flour is wet. You should have a slurry of water/flour. It should be pretty thick but not like a paste. Then take a spoonful of this mixture and add it to the sauce. Be sure to have everything on low heat, and then stir like mad. You don't want the flour mixture to thicken up too quickly, or else it will get lumpy. Stirring is very important. It will take a good minute or two of stirring before you notice any thickening. Don't add more flour/water until after a couple of minutes. If it's not thick enough after one spoonful, then add another or however much you think it needs. You'll want a good thick sauce which you can drizzle over the bread pudding. But it shouldn't be like an icing. It should have a consistency between salad dressing and a thin pancake batter. I know, I should get awards for my analogies. After you're done, you can pour the sauce over the whole bread pudding form, and let folks dig in. Or you can cut it up into pieces and put the sauce on each piece. If you have leftovers, you can refrigerate it. To re-prepare, a great idea is to fry the bread-pudding as a way to warm it up and make it crispy. Take a slice, butter up a pan, and griddle it like french toast. Throw some maple syrup on it and you're good. |
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