Monday, June 01, 2009

Cooking: Raspberry Bread Pudding

This is a pretty fakey recipe but I think you can make it work.

Things you'll need:
Bread (something good and thick, that can soak up a lot of custard)
Half-and-half or cream or milk
Eggs (probably a half dozen by the time you're all done)
Raspberries and some raspberry puree
Sugar
Vanilla extract

First, you get a bowl, and tear up some bread until it fills the bowl. Old bread is probably good here, and you probably don't want to use a sliced loaf because it'll be too thin. I used some old French-ish rolls we had sitting around. Dump the bread in a pan, turn your oven on as low as it goes, and put the bread in there for a few minutes to stale it out (unless, of course, you want to wait 24 hours or so for it to get stale naturally). This works surprisingly well.

Now, take the bowl you ripped the bread into, fill it about half full of half-and-half (or cream, or whatever - we didn't quite have enough half-and-half, so I put some regular milk in it too). Add one or two eggs (depending on how big your bowl is) and some sugar (enough to make it sweet) and a good slosh of vanilla, then whisk it until the eggs are completely blended. Then dump the bread in to soak. Stir it around every few minutes until the bread has absorbed as much custard as it can possibly hold.

So we were making raspberry jam, and I had some leftover raspberry puree with the seeds strained out. Put some of that, about half as much sugar, and enough lemon juice to make it tart in a pan and cook it down until it's syrupy.

Once the bread has absorbed as much custard as it can, dump 3/4 of it in a lightly greased baking pan (size depending again on how much bread you used - I used a 9"x9", I think), then cover it with the raspberry sauce and put some frozen raspberries in there (I don't see why you couldn't use fresh, except maybe they would bake funny), then put the rest of the bread-custard mix on top. Bake at 350-375°F for about 40 minutes or until a knife stuck in the middle comes out clean.

While it's baking, make some creme anglaise (this recipe came out a little bit eggy for me - maybe because I didn't have cream - but you might consider going down to 3 yolks) and put it in the refrigerator to cool. (Actually, it would probably be a good idea to make before-hand so it's actually cold.)

Serve the pudding warm with the cold sauce on it, garnish with fresh raspberries. Yum.

1 comment:

momtothree said...

Please I want some!!