More Dealing with Homemade Bread Failures: Bread Pudding

When I make our regular sandwich bread, I make three loaves at a time.  When my sandwich bread fails, it fails with three loaves at a time.  That’s a lot of bread not to waste.  Bread crumbs, using the recipe in yesterday’s post, will use up one loaf of bread.  One down, two to go.

So I decided for the very first time in my life to make some bread pudding.  I figured it was something my husband grew up with.  (Apparently, he did not.  Maybe he just forgot.  I think he’s talked about it enough.  His memory isn’t that great.  Yeah, I’m going to go with that story.)

Anyway, I had another loaf of bread to use up.  So I searched Food.com for recipes.  I wanted a basic bread pudding recipe, one without too much sugar or exotic ingredients.  I certainly didn’t need a recipe that called for brandy or bourbon.  And gee whiz, they’ve got over a thousand recipes for bread pudding.  Wowza.

Clearly, the best plan of attack was to select the most popular recipe and tweak it ever so slightly to be more food storage-friendly.

Bread Pudding

4 cups bread cubes

3 eggs, beaten

1 ¾ cups whole milk

¼ cup butter, melted

¾ cup sugar

¼ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Dash cinnamon and nutmeg

Place bread cubes in a greased 9x9” pan.  Whisk together the eggs, milk, butter, sugar, salt, and vanilla extract.  Pour over the bread cubes and stir to coat evenly.  Sprinkle lightly with cinnamon and nutmeg.  Bake at 350°F for about 30 minutes.  Serve warm with warm brown sugar sauce, recipe below.

Brown Sugar Sauce

2 tablespoons flour

1 tablespoon butter

1 cup packed brown sugar

1 cup boiling water

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

In a small saucepan, cut butter into flour.  Stir in the brown sugar.  Gradually add boiling water and stir until smooth.  Bring to a boil over medium heat and continue cooking until thick.  Remove from heat and stir in vanilla. 

 

The original recipe says stale white bread is best; I used day-old whole wheat bread.  I’ve seen other recipes suggesting that stale hamburger or hotdog buns are even better.  The chef at the hospital where my husband used to work, St. Mary’s in Reno, used day-old donuts.  The original recipe also called for a cup of whipping cream.  I decided on 1 ¾ cups of milk and ¼ cup of butter.  I feel that whipping cream may be hard to come by in the future.  Those were the only two modifications I made the first time. 

Family reviews:  My husband was initially a little skeptical; I think he was having thirds by the time I left the house this evening, and he definitely wanted some in his lunch for tomorrow.  Jared had at least one serving.  I think Lydia had two.  And even I, someone a bit biased against bread pudding, thought it tasted pretty good.  As my husband noted, it kinda tastes like French toast, but better.  Also, the brown sugar sauce is like a less expensive version of the caramel syrup that we use with pumpkin waffles and yogurt-banana pancakes.  The caramel syrup would take this bread pudding up a notch.  Likewise, the brown sugar sauce could be used as a more economical substitute for the caramel syrup with waffles and pancakes.  I wouldn’t hesitate to use the brown sugar syrup with kids or anyone else I didn’t need to impress.  The brown sugar syrup doesn’t have anywhere near as much butter or other fat, so it’s a little lower in calories. (Oh, and wow.  There was one serving left when I got home last night, and then some shameless ruffian had it for breakfast this morning.)

Two days later, I still had one loaf of less desirable bread left to use.  I had just left it on the counter without bagging it because I was so mad that it didn't rise well.  So it was really dry.  And I decided, what the heck, I'd make another pan of bread pudding.  But this time, I decided to go all out on the food storage ingredients.  Powdered eggs, powdered milk, coconut oil added to the milk to increase the fat content, and coconut oil instead of butter.  I had leftover caramel syrup, so we used that instead of the brown sugar syrup that was long gone anyway.  

Was it as good as the other?  I didn't ask.  The kids noted it was a little drier.  (Probably because I left the bread uncovered for two days, duh.)  I will admit that it lasted a whole 60 minutes longer than the other pan.  So basically, using all long-term food storage to make this totally works. At least, around here it does.

Links to related posts:

Pumpkin Waffles and Caramel Syrup

Yogurt-Banana Pancakes

Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread

Homemade Bread Crumbs