 I think I need to be left alone with this. Go away now. Hello and welcome to this episode of Bake It Up A Notch. I'm Erin Jean McDowell and I am so excited for today's episode where we are going to be talking all things bread pudding with a little bit of help from my friends at Le Courset. Like most of my favorite baked goods, bread pudding is infinitely adaptable, but it also is very easy to master. So after our episode today, I really hope you're going to be able to customize and make your own versions of bread pudding with all the tools we're providing. As always, I've got a really delicious recipe for you today. It's got cake. It's got chocolate. It's gooey. It's custardy. It's epic. Stay tuned for the details. But we're also going to talk about all the equipment you need and how to get the perfect bake on your bread pudding so that it is soft, moist, and so delicious, especially when you serve it warm. It's going to be a blast and I can't wait to get started. So let's get baking. Let's talk about the equipment you need to make a great bread pudding. Luckily, there's not that much that you need, and you can really adapt this to a bunch of different sizes and shapes of baking vessels if you ever wanted to. But as usual, I have my favorites. So first, I want to talk about the water bath. I sort of introduced this as to water bath or not to water bath because that is always the question with baked custards. Baked custards are very often made in a water bath because it helps the custard to bake more gradually. This helps prevent a rubbery texture by keeping everything sort of moist, soft, and delicious. It also introduces moisture into the oven, which helps these baked custards from drying out. Now, that said, it's not always necessary to use a water bath with a baked custard. Now, since I don't use a water bath, I have found my preferred baking dish and it is this littered casserole dish from Le Courset. Now, this dish has a few different advantages. I love the naturally nonstick stoneware, especially for something like a baked custard. Those can be kind of prone to sticking in places even when we use a good amount of butter to help grease the pan. So that's really important. And on that note, it's also dishwasher safe. So this is an easy thing to clean up after, and it should be because it's an easy thing to bake. So we don't want the cleaning up to be the hardest part of this. But my actual favorite part of this is the lid. While I don't use the lid during baking, I'm able to put the lid on when it comes out of the oven and it helps it retain the heat and the moisture. So this is so, so important for bread pudding because we really want it to be kind of ooey and gooey on the inside. If we just leave it in the open air, even just for a few minutes, it's gonna be prone to drying out from the surface down. So by putting that lid on right after baking, we can retain the heat until we're ready to carry this to the table and we can keep things nice and moist just how we like them. So this is a rectangular casserole dish. You can adapt bread pudding recipes to be made in something like a square dish or even a round cake pan. But this for me is the perfect portion size and it's great especially for when I'm serving guests because I can take it right from the fridge where it's soaking overnight to the oven and then right to the table too. Let's talk about the components of a bread pudding. First, let's talk about the base. Now of course, bread pudding has the word bread in the title so typically bread pudding is made with bread as the base. But I really want people to think outside of the bread box a little bit. You could really use anything starchy as the base for this baked custard. So some examples I've got in front of me. I definitely have bread. I also have croissants. I have waffles. I've used things like biscuits and later on in this episode we're actually going to make a bread pudding one of my favorite ways which is with a pound cake base. So there's really a lot of options. Does the ingredient need to be stale to make a great bread pudding? Not necessarily. But typically these are made using stale ingredients because it helps it absorb the custard more effectively. This is actually great for so many things because what if you end up with a bunch of stale bread or a bunch of stale baked goods? This is a great way to reinvigorate them, bring them back to life and still bring them to serve at your table. If you have an ingredient that you want to use as the base and it's not stale, you can encourage it to stale by cutting it into cubes, increasing the surface area and laying it out on a baking sheet. Sometimes I like to do this overnight but even just for a few hours is going to help dry out the ingredients enough that they will absorb the custard a little bit better. Bread pudding is one of my favorite types of custards. It is considered a baked custard. Other types of baked custards that you might be familiar with are things like creme brûlée or even pumpkin pie. That is a custard that's baked inside of a pie crust. So a baked custard is actually really, really easy to make. It often involves only just stirring the ingredients together and in this case, pouring them over the base. The custard can be flavored a variety of different ways too. For a sweet custard, I might add something like vanilla extract or cinnamon or I might even melt some chocolate or stir in some cocoa powder into the custard. But for a savory bread pudding, those are often called strata. A savory bread pudding might have ingredients like fresh chopped herbs or dried herbs or spices, a little bit of chili flake. Really the sky is the limit for flavoring your custard to pair with your other components. Now here comes one of the fun parts, the inclusions. We've talked about this word before on Bake It Up A Notch. It's basically just a fancy word for the other stuff you put in the baked good. So in this case, what are the other textures and flavors we want in our bread pudding? We can use the inclusions to help give us a little bit of variety and add some more flavor and textures. So some great examples for sweet bread puddings would be things like chocolate chips or chopped chocolate, toasted nuts. You could chop them or leave them whole depending on what you're doing. You can also use softer ingredients or spreads, things like nut butter or jam. Actually one of my favorite ways to make bread pudding is to take two pieces of bread and actually make a sandwich with something flavorful inside and then cut those into cubes to use as the base for the bread pudding. So here I used a little bit of chocolate hazelnut spread and jam to make a really flavorful bread pudding base. And then of course you can also add fresh ingredients, things like fresh fruit or dried fruit too. You can add things like fresh herbs. Here we've got kind of our savory take. I was thinking this would be really good with a croissant bread pudding. We can add some ham, cheese, chives, maybe a little mustard in there to add a little tang. There are really so many ways you can get creative with bread pudding and I'm going to tell you a little bit more about how to do that as we talk about our custard ratio. My basic bread pudding ratio is based on a rectangular baking pan. So you know about a 9x13 pan is what you're looking for. First things first, you're going to want to use one tablespoon or 14 grams of butter to grease your baking dish all over the base and the sides. For the base I'm actually introducing a big twist. Normally I'm all about weight here on Bake It Up Anarch because it's the most accurate way to bake. But because the weight of different base components can vary so drastically, this is one time I'm going to recommend that you use volume as your guideline. You want to fill your baking dish about three quarters of the way full. A typical rectangular casserole dish can take about 14 to 16 cups. So we're going to want to use 10 to 12 cups of your base component. For the custard, you're going to want to grab a medium bowl and whisk together the following. Two and three-quarter cups or 633 grams of whole milk. One cup or 235 grams of heavy cream. One third to two-thirds cup, which is 66 to 132 grams of granulated sugar. There's a range here because you might want to use a little less sugar if your inclusions are particularly sweet, something like chocolate or fruit, anything like that. You might want to use a little bit more if you're not using as many inclusions. Four large eggs or 226 grams. A half teaspoon or two grams of fine sea salt. And then whatever flavorings you want to add. A little bit of vanilla, a couple tablespoons of cocoa powder. Again, the sky's the limit. Ingredients like chocolate, molasses or caramel might need to be heated to make sure they're evenly incorporated into your custard. In that case, I usually heat them with a small amount of the dairy so that I can just make sure that they're fully included before finishing off my custard. You can really add however many inclusions you like. Just remember not to add too much because we don't want to overfill our pan. So you now want to add more than two cups or 475 milliliters of inclusion ingredients. Another piece of advice, remember that ingredients high in moisture like fresh fruit can make the bread puddings take a little longer to set. So in those cases, you might want to use a little less than two cups. Then we're going to combine our base and inclusions in our prepared casserole dish and pour the custard evenly over them. I like to do this slowly, almost like a drizzle, to make sure each piece is fully coated. Then we're going to let our bread pudding rest for one hour or up to 12 hours overnight and it'll be ready to bake. I can't wait to see what kind of bread puddings you dream up using this base ratio. In this recipe, we're actually using pound cake as the base for the bread pudding. And I know that can even sound a little bit wild, but just think about a layer cake. You've got all these layers of beautiful cake with all that frosting. Instead, we are just drowning our cake in a delicious chocolatey custard. And best of all, we get to serve it warm. So it's ooey and gooey and it's just going to be so, so delicious. I can't wait. So we're going to make a pound cake for this using the classic creaming method. We'll start by beating some butter and sugar until they're nice and light and fluffy. You can see that my butter actually got a little bit of a head start because when we plugged in the mixer, it had a mind of its own and it just started mixing without us. It is so ready to be pound cake. So I'm just going to lift this up and add our sugar in here. We'll cream that till it's nice and light and fluffy and we're going to add the eggs one at a time and a little bit of vanilla. And we'll keep on mixing. Let's add the eggs one at a time. I'm going to scrape the bowl really well after each addition to make sure it's fully incorporated. All right, all of our eggs and vanilla are incorporated. I'm just going to whisk my dry ingredients together and I'm going to add them alternating with our wet ingredient, which is sour cream, which makes this a really tangy, delicious pound cake. I love making pound cake because it really is such a simple and quick cake. And of course, by making it myself, I could also flavor it however I want. I love this sour cream pound cake because it's nice and tangy. But if you're wanting to make a bread pudding like this and you don't really want to go through this little bit of effort, you can definitely also use a store-bought or bakery-bought pound cake for this recipe. Just check my recipe. It's linked in the video description below and I tell you how much you'll need. Once I get all this batter in here, I'll spread it into an even layer and we'll bake it at 350 degrees Fahrenheit until a tester inserted into the center comes out clean or with just a few moist crumbs. I have one that's already ready so I'm going to grab it so we can talk about what you do with this pound cake once you're done. Okay, look at our beautiful pound cake. This one is already cooled. So I'm going to just go ahead and pop it out of the pan. This is one of the reasons I like to line this pound cake pan with a little bit of parchment paper just to make sure I can really easily pop it out like that. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and cut this first into strips. I'm going to cut this pound cake into cubes because I just want lots of exposed surface area of the crumb structure that's going to soak up all that custard. As I cut my pound cake into cubes here, I'm just going to transfer it to a baking sheet, give it a chance to dry out a little bit. You can let your base ingredient, especially this pound cake, dry out up to two days. But if you don't have time to do that, it's okay. Just remember, it may not soak up the custard in the same way, but it's still going to be crazy delicious. So this is a flavorful twist on that classic basic custard ratio. I'm going to flavor it with chocolate. So to do this, I'm actually going to use some chocolate and also some cocoa powder. And in order to do that and get it all nice and melted, I actually need to heat it up with some of the dairy product. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put my milk into this medium pot. What we're going to make is going to look a little bit like hot cocoa. I'm going to add my sugar, cocoa powder, and our chocolate. You can use chocolate chips here, or you can use chopped chocolate. I'm using a darker chocolate here, about 64%. I like to use a whisk to help heat this up. It helps break up any clumps with the cocoa powder. And it also keeps things in motion so that that chocolate doesn't burn or scorch on the bottom of our pan as we heat it. Once this is heated, we're going to transfer it to another heat-safe bowl. I've got this one right here. And I'm going to add the cream to it. That cold cream is going to help bring the temperature of the custard back down a little bit, because as I mentioned before, you don't always have to do a custard like this on the stove. It gets baked during that oven time. The only reason I'm doing this is to make sure I get that chocolate incorporated into the custard. So it's just going to be a pretty short heating process, but I don't necessarily want to add eggs to a warm dairy mixture. So once this is a little bit warm, we can use that cold cream to bring the temperature down. And we can add in our eggs, and we're ready to pour it over. Okay, let's just pour this into this heat-safe bowl. Now I'll add my cream into it. If we were to add the eggs right into this, we might risk scrambling some of them. So the temperature of that cream is really going to be our friend here. Already, when I put my hand on this bowl, it doesn't feel warm anymore, because that cream really helped to cool things down. I can also add my vanilla and my salt. And I'm just going to add my eggs one at a time, whisking them really well to combine before I add the next one. It looks like my custard is pretty much ready, so I want to go get my lecressé lidded casserole pan so that I'm ready to build my bread pudding. I can put all of my base in there, along with the inclusions, and we can pour this custard right over. Remember, don't mix your custard too soon before you're ready to use this. We want to make sure that it stays creamy and is ready to use until the last second. All right, let's assemble our bread pudding. I've got about a tablespoon of butter in the bottom of my dish, because I love to use a generous amount of butter as the greasing situation for this, both for a little bit of flavor as well as to make sure we don't get anything stuck, any unnecessary crispy bits. We want this to be nice and gooey. So I've got my pound cake. I'm going to go ahead and put a little bit in here. And I also have my inclusions. I'm going to use some chopped, toasted nuts and also a little bit more chocolate. I just really want this to be melty and ooey and gooey. I think that's one of the best parts about serving something warm like this. And a little bit of nuts for some crunch, too. You can also just dump everything in and then kind of use your hands to toss it. But when I build it, sometimes I like to kind of layer it like this just to make sure I get a nice, even distribution of all of these things. Okay. Beautiful. Now let us drown it in chocolate custard. And the world shall rejoice. Feel like I'm giving cake a custard bath. And I'll cover you and you and you and you and you. All right. Our bread pudding is all assembled. The custard is on top. We are ready to bake this baby. Now we already talked about we're not using a water bath here. So I need to cover this with some foil. Just going to really tighten it around the handles of my casserole dish. And when I put it in the oven, I also want to make sure I've got that lid at the ready. So the moment this comes out of the oven, I can put that lid on top and keep all the moisture inside. I'm going to bake it with this foil on at 350 for a little while. But then I'm going to take the foil off right at the end. I just like to get a little bit of crispy texture at the top when I'm about ready to serve. But I'm not quite ready to bake it yet. First, I want to let this rest because I want that custard to get absorbed into our pound cake. To do this, I can rest it in the fridge for one hour or up to 12 hours. This is actually my preference. I usually like to make this the night before. Let it rest overnight. And that way I'm ready to wow someone with bread pudding with no more effort the very next day. So into the fridge it goes for a good long soak. Really the hardest part of getting a baked custard perfect is getting the bake right. It's typically advised when you're making a baked custard to under bake it slightly. It's going to retain some heat. And as it cools, it will continue to firm up. But a lot of people have a tendency to bake it a little bit too long and then that retention of heat just continues to bake the bread pudding. And remember, when you're baking in something like stoneware, it really loves to retain the heat. That's why we love stoneware. So we really want to make sure we get that bake just perfect. What we're looking for is we're looking for it to be set around the edges, but we're looking for it to be only barely jiggly in the center. When you shake your bread pudding dish, you should be able to just see a little bit of movement, but only right here in the middle. Everywhere else, it should be nice and firm and set. But people have a tendency to under bake or over bake these bread puddings. So I think it's important to discuss what happens in both cases. Under baking the bread pudding, it's still going to look pretty liquid throughout. And even though it's going to retain some of that heat and continue to set a little bit, it may not be enough to get it all the way set as much as you want. And you may end up with a liquid center. Remember, since this is thickened with eggs, if we have a liquid center, it may also not be totally safe to eat. So this is really important. We're looking for a jiggle, not a sloshy, loose wiggle. Does that make sense? You guys get me? I think you get me. Now, over baking is on the other end. When your oven is running a little bit too hot or maybe you forget to set a timer, all of those things, you could see a couple different things happen with your bread pudding. This one in front of me has actually two mistakes. So one is a little bit harder to see, but I'm going to show you all the same. When you over bake, the bread pudding can start to pull away a little bit from the sides. You're especially going to see this at the corners and the edges. And you can see it really well right here. Come here, Faki. See how it's pulled away from the edge there? And over here. Over baking a bread pudding will still be safe to eat, but it can have almost a rubbery texture because the eggs have set a little bit too much. So we definitely want to avoid both under baking and over baking. When you over bake a bread pudding, it can also get a crack as it cools. It could get a crack right down the middle. It could get some little cracks around the edges. Think about a cheesecake, another classic baked custard. When it has a big crack down the middle, it's usually a sign that it's been over baked. And any baked custard is the same. The benefit of bread pudding is it doesn't often show those cracks the same way something like a cheesecake does. So it's a little bit more forgiving. But this bread pudding, I managed to over bake and under bake this bread pudding at the same time. So the edges are starting to pull away and they are going to be too firm and crusty. But in the middle here, oh my gosh, look, it's soup. So this is an example. It was still sloshing a little bit when we picked it up. And as a result, look, it's literally running down into it. So this is an under baked bread pudding. But then over here at the edges, we also have it's so firm. We've got like, these are almost like croutons. They are crunchy. They are crispy. And that's not how it should be. This whole dish should have one uniform texture. So remember, you're looking for just a gentle bit of movement to show the doneness. And the moment you take it out of the oven, be sure to put your lid on to keep that moisture and keep that little bit of heat that's left trapped in. And you're going to have a perfect bread pudding every time. I am so excited to have four beautiful bread puddings in front of me. Of course, we have our delicious chocolate pound cake bread pudding, but we also have these other ones that I sort of rift to make using the base ratio. So let's talk about all the ones that we made today and get a big reveal. These lids are on these dishes, keeping them nice and warm. And that's really one of the best parts about bread pudding. I love this whole being able to take it from the oven to the table. And best of all, we can bake it in something that is as beautiful to bake it in as it is to serve it in. So let's start with this one. Oh, okay. This is a bread pudding that I made a little sandwich with. I put the hazelnut chocolate butter on one side, some raspberry jam on the other, between two slices of brioche. And then I cut those into cubes and just use the base ratio custard with this. And look how beautiful. I love this because you get a little bit of everything in every single bite. This one looks killer. Okay, then we've got, ooh, we've got our little savory guy. So this is the croissant bread pudding. I put some chives in the custard and some ham and cheese in as our inclusions. So we've got an awesome savory take here. Not sweet at all. This would be so amazing for brunch or lunch. Love this so much. And then here, another awesome breakfast choice. We have the waffle and blueberry bread pudding. In this one, instead of granulated sugar, I use a little maple syrup to sweeten it. And that way we kind of get all the flavors of breakfast all in one bread pudding. It's a thing of beauty what we have here. And of course, the pièce de résistance in the beautiful Marseille Blue from Lycoursay. The chocolate pound cake bread pudding. Ah, the ground goes wild. I mean, it's so beautiful. And the smell when I took this off, it's just like a waft of chocolate to the face. So I want to eat this one immediately. I'm just going to move these other ones aside. Okay, I'm ready to eat and try some of this chocolate pound cake bread pudding. I see some gooey melted chocolate already. I see some crispier bits right on the surface. I'm just going to dive right in here. Oh, I may need a minute, guys. It's so chocolatey. But best of all, it isn't insanely sweet. It's this incredibly rich bowl of goodness. And I think one of the best things about this is that it's the same texture all the way through, except for that little bit of crispness on the top. It's baking in the stoneware that really gave us that because it is just perfectly gooey and warm and moist all the way through. And then we trapped all that perfectly bakedness inside by putting the lid on right after baking. I really hope this episode inspires you to create some bread puddings of your very own. And if it does, please use hashtag bake it up a notch because I'd love to see what you're making in your kitchen. As always, the recipe we made in this episode is linked in the video description below, so you can snag it there. And until next time, happy baking.