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I had a part time job working as a dessert cook for a fine dining restaurant at one point. One of the desserts on the menu was a bread pudding. Bread pudding is a deceptively decadent dessert, and easy to class up for fine dining service. The ingredients for the base cake are cheap — some eggs, some bread, some milk, some sugar. The standard bread pudding on the menu was a white chocolate bread pudding that was served with sweet cream.
Seasonally we would break out a variation on the bread pudding as a limited edition on the menu. One variation was made with raisins, topped with nuts, and served with a sweet bourbon syrup. I fell in love with this simple but heavenly dessert.
The desserts set this job apart for me. When you go out to eat at your typical TGI-Chili-Bee’s type restaurant you are guaranteed to be eating desserts that were shipped in frozen and thawed for service. My job was to bake all of our desserts in-house from scratch.
The best part about bread pudding is that you can use almost any scavenged ingredient to dress it up and you will come up with something wonderful. I have done variations using ingredients like bananas and Nutella; peanut butter; raisins and cinnamon — but out of all of the variations I have tried there is one recipe that came out a clear winner — Chocolate Chip Bread Pudding.
I’m going to be honest right off the bat here, I have measurements listed out for the ingredients but the truth is when I am baking and cooking at home I don’t measure shit even if my life depends on it. This recipe is an approximation of the one we used for the restaurant and I never had the foresight to scale it down for my own home use before leaving that job. All of these measurements are a big fat old guess that I eyeballed after the fact. I have a lovely set of colorful measuring cups that exist for decoration only. I am an absolute monster.
Use the measurements I provided as a guideline, but close your eyes and listen to the voices of your ancestors as they whisper in your ear. Mine generally tell me that I am a disappointment, and also that I should add more chocolate chips.
The base of this recipe is an entire loaf of bread. Almost any kind of bread will work — I have used stale or past date hotdog or hamburger buns I “liberated” from my fast food job.
Stale bread is the best for this recipe because it will suck up all of the liquid ingredients perfectly. If you are starting with a fresh loaf of bread, you can lay the bread cubes on a baking sheet in an even layer and bake them just long enough to dry out — not toasted! It should only take a few minutes.
You’re supposed to cut the bread into evenly sized- cubes per the restaurant version of this recipe, but nobody has that kind of patience. Hack it up. Go nuts. Go ahead and shred the bread with your bare hands for all I care.
It tastes good cold but try it fresh out of the oven or microwaved for a few seconds to take it to the next level.
Originally published at https://filltheskillet.com on February 22, 2021.
