TWD: Four Star Chocolate Bread Pudding

This week's Tuesdays With Dorie recipe for Four Star Chocolate Bread Pudding was chosen by Lauren of Upper East Side Chronicle. I love bread pudding -- I will never forget the first time I tried the bread pudding souffle at Commander's Palace in New Orleans -- but I have never made it before. And my track record with the so-called "spoon desserts" I've made with TWD did not exactly leave me brimming with confidence going into this one. Some of my spoon desserts turned out more like "straw desserts;" others more like "shot glass" desserts. There have been the fugly mutant custards and the floating islands that reminded my husband of alka seltzer (in a good way). So I was really feeling the pressure to turn out a semi-respectable bread pudding, so as to not be permanently banished to the spoon dessert hall of shame.

The threshold question that must be asked before making any bread pudding is "what kind of bread?" Dorie suggests "brioche, challah or white," and there were all kinds of cool ideas floating around on the P&Q, including doughnuts. Oh yeah! But as soon as I saw that brioche was a good option for this bread pudding, I knew that it was time for me to roll up my sleeves and attempt to make Dorie's version of this rich, buttery bread that has long intrigued and intimidated me.

I made the brioche (and sticky buns with the other half of the dough). My loaf had a misshapen form and slightly overdone crust that only a mother could love:



But it looked much better when sliced



And it tasted delicious. I cut off the amount needed for a half recipe of this bread pudding, and let it sit out in the open air to "stale up" a bit. I kept checking it, but you know how the old saying goes, "a watched loaf never stales" -- so I ended up using Dorie's technique to speed up the staling process in the oven.

Once the bread is stale, cube it and throw it in a pyrex pan. Heat up some whole milk (I used 2% because that's what I had) and cream, and in a separate bowl whisk together eggs, egg yolks, and sugar. You know what's coming next, don't you? Milk heating, eggs in a separate bowl? Oh yes, that could only mean one thing -- "tempering the eggs so they don't curdle." I have a Pavlovian reaction (profanity) whenever I read those words, which is interesting because I think I actually have not curdled eggs much more than I've curdled them. But I always have this nagging feeling that the eggs are going to do what they are going to do regardless of anything I do in the hot-milk-pouring or whisking department. I guess I am an egg fatalist.

But my eggs did not curdle this time, and I continued pouring and whisking vigorously, and then added chopped chocolate to the mixture, whisking all the while.

ACTION SHOT!!!



Pour the custard over the bread. I apparently did not do as good of a job de-bubbling as I was supposed to.



And let the bread sit on the counter for 30 minutes, pressing down on the bread with the back of a spoon occasionally.

This gets baked in a water bath -- the bread pudding pan goes in a larger roasting pan, and then you pour hot water into the roasting pan until the water comes halfway up the sides of the pudding pan. I managed to slosh some water into the pudding while I was pouring - I was apparently just being "careful," rather than "very careful," as Dorie advises. It's done in 35 to 45 minutes, or when "the pudding is uniformly puffed, the top is dull and dry and a thin knife inserted deep into the center comes out clean."



The result? This was delicious! Unlike some of the other desserts we've made recently, this was chocolatey, but not insanely so. It was rich, comforting and satisfying, and there was no doubt that the brioche was the star of this pudding. This might be one of the first times I've ever disagreed with one of Dorie's serving suggestions -- she recommends serving this at cool room temperature or cold instead of warm, but I really loved it best warm (the warm pudding was especially good with homemade vanilla ice cream!)

Hubs doesn't eat chocolate, so I enlisted my kids to help me with this. My one year old loved it; my four year old would not try it; and my six year old tried one bite and said that it was really good, but then wouldn't eat any more. I must look like I have a fragile ego, though, because he went out of his way to reassure me that just because he wasn't eating it didn't mean that he didn't like it.



You can hop on over to Lauren's blog for the recipe. Thanks for the great pick, Lauren!

TWD: Figgy Real Butterscotch Pudding, or "Actually, I WILL go before I get some."

This week's Tuesdays With Dorie selection is Real Butterscotch Pudding, chosen by Donna of Spatulas, Corkscrews & Suitcases. I'll say this much, if you are invited somewhere for dinner and offer to bring the dessert, you can feel pretty confident that your hosts are not expecting butterscotch pudding. So this definitely has that "surprise element" going for it. Also, since there is no way that I'll be able to bluff my way through this entire post, let me just go ahead and say at the outset that until I read the recipe, I had no idea that butterscotch is made out of butter and scotch. I guess I just always thought that butterscotch was its own . . . thing. You know, the way that coconut is just coconut -- it's not made out of coco(a) and nuts? Right? Who's with me?

Well, once I learned that butterscotch = butter + scotch, I assumed that meant yet another trip to the package store for me, since neither of us drink scotch and therefore I figured we didn't have any. But when I dug into the depths of our sunscreen/bugspray/liquor cabinet (we are a professional organizer's worst nightmare)

I realized that we had not one, not two, but three bottles of scotch from which to choose:

.

My husband received all of these bottles as holiday gifts from business associates over the years. Apparently, he has that "scotch drinker" look about him.

In order to figure out which scotch to use, I decided to do a little research on the characteristics that are distinctive to fine single malt scotches. There are hundreds of pages devoted to this topic, and I don't know if I'm just grumpy or lacking intellectual curiosity or burned out from the holiday frenzy or what, but about two minutes into my research I realized that I just really don't care about fine single malt scotches. at. all. I decided to do eeny meeny miney moe instead, and the winner was {drumroll please} . . . .



Making the pudding was remarkably quick and easy. I started it at 11 p.m. after a long night of present wrapping, and it was in the fridge by 11:30. It starts out with my most feared kitchen task, boiling sugar:



Standing there and not walking away from it while it was boiling made ALL the difference in avoiding an unfettered disaster. Who knew?

After mixing some stuff up in the food processor (I can't remember what, but be sure to check Donna's blog for the recipe!), you slowly pour in the hot liquid to the running food processor. I was positive that this was going to explode on me, but it didn't. It really is true that we are not given more than we can handle. After a quick processing, return it to the pan to thicken it up.

My only previous foray into pudding thickening was with the arborio rice pudding, and that was a rough road. My first attempt with that resulted in rice soup, and my second attempt turned out somewhat better, but new babies got their learner's permits in the time that it took to thicken. But this butterscotch pudding thickened up beautifully:

It smelled SO good while it was cooking. It really smelled like it would be perfect just as it was, but there was still butter, vanilla and scotch to be added.

I am not really a "hard liquor" kind of gal. I can generally only deal with it if the liquor flavor is heavily masked by mixers. Back in my pre-kid days, when we'd go to the Blue Monkey with friends after work, I'd order something like a Sweet Tartini and immediately cease to be taken seriously by everyone at the table. So I feared that I would not enjoy this pudding because of the scotch. But I remained optimistic, thinking that the combination of butter + vanilla + scotch + sugar + general Dorie magic would result in a whole new flavor, "butterscotch," which I knew that I liked, having had it many times before without ever detecting so much as a trace of "scotch."

Unfortunately, when I finally tried the pudding, I felt like I was spoon-feeding myself a Glenlivet, which is so wrong on so many levels. I am still kicking myself for not leaving the scotch out of at least half of the pudding, because I really think I would have enjoyed this much more without it. I also read in the P&Q (too late) that someone added the scotch during the cooking process, which helped burn some of it off -- that's another great idea. But for my taste, the scotch was just overpowering.



I really enjoyed making this anyway. It was fun to watch the ingredients morph into actual pudding. And I think that I would have honestly loved this without the scotch. Thanks for the fun pick, Donna! And Merry Christmas, everyone!

EDITED ON 12/23, 7:50 AM: I finally got a chance to ask David what he thought about this -- we've been like two ships passing in the night with all of the Christmas running around that's been going on. He said "I wouldn't want to eat it after every meal, but I liked it. Generally, I like to eat dessert and I like to drink booze, but I prefer to keep them separate. But there is something kind of festive about sneaking your hooch in your treats."

TWD: Arborio Rice Pudding

I'm having a lot of "I'm not as young as I used to be" moments lately. Like when I went into Abercrombie a couple of weeks ago to buy a present for my pre-teen niece, and was completely overwhelmed by the smell of cologne, pulsating loud music, and oversized pictures of half naked people on the wall. Maybe it's just me, but the very day that I left the 18-34 demographic, in addition to becoming less desirable to advertisers, I lost all ability to be in Abercrombie for more than 3 seconds without feeling utterly desperate to leave. As I stood in the checkout line, I found myself praying for the line to move faster, and in return I promised to be a better person and a more faithful servant starting the moment I exited the store. After mercifully completing my transaction and departing, I felt like quite the cougar walking around the mall with my Abercrombie shopping bag, which, natch, was adorned on all four sides with young naked lads.

And then there's Rolling Stone magazine, which my husband has been getting since college. Reading Rolling Stone on a regular basis will either keep you young (David), or age you prematurely (me). It has become something of a joke in our house, because as far as we know, we don't pay for this magazine. They never send us renewal notices, so we can't decline to renew, and we have never notified them of our new address when we move. And yet, somehow Rolling Stone always finds us. So every two weeks, no matter where we are in the world, the mailman or a carrier pigeon will drop Rolling Stone on our doorstep, and every two weeks, I read it and find myself perplexed, in that way that old people are, at the music that the kids are listening to today, and their crazy "Young Hollywood" party ways, and the fact that Kim Kardashian is even a little bit famous. Yes, back in the days before fire, we partied with Prince! And we did it without getting arrested!

But really, nothing tells me that I am getting old quite like the fact that I enjoyed this rice pudding. As a kid, I thought of rice pudding as an "old lady dessert." I'll have to investigate further to figure out why I thought this. Mom, did Grandma used to serve rice pudding to the ladies on pinochle night? I like to believe that my thoughts about many things have evolved a bit since I was six, but my thinking on one issue has remained firmly entrenched over the past thirty years: rice pudding = old lady dessert. And yet here I am, helping myself to seconds. Hand me my reading glasses, David, I'm making us some more rice pudding!

Well, I should have known as soon as I read the simple-seeming directions that making this would give me fits. It sounded too easy to be true. Parboil the rice and set it aside, and then stir together milk and sugar and bring it to a boil.

A watched pan of sugared milk never boils:



Eventually it did boil, of course, and like the good little recipe-follower that I am, I turned it down to low and set the kitchen timer for 30 minutes. I stirred occasionally, as I was directed to do. And thirty minutes later, it looked exactly the same as it did to begin with! I felt like I was trying to rise kugelhopf dough again, what with all that was not happening in my kitchen despite the passage of the prescribed period of time. I decided to be crazy and turn the heat up to medium low. I continued to stir occasionally, and the sugar/milk continued to not do much of anything. Finally, probably close to an hour into the process, if I looked really really hard, I thought that I could see the rice floating under the surface.

Thar she blows!



Okay, so Dorie says that means that it's almost done -- great! I let it go a few more minutes, and divided it into a couple of bowls. I made one vanilla, and one chocolate:



It was very much still liquid, but I wasn't worried -- Dorie said that it would be, and that the puddingification would occur once it chilled for six hours. Well, alas, for me, pudding was not to be. Mine stayed liquid. I almost threw it out, but then Audrey suggested that I keep it and use a bendy straw instead. I tell you, I just have the coolest, smartest blogging friends! Thanks, Audrey!

Arborio Rice Pudding: The Liquid Years



But for the fact that there is something inherently unpleasant about arborio rice coming at you through a straw, this would have been a fabulous milkshake! The flavor really was wonderful.

Well, to paraphrase my friend Lisa, "I'm no quitter," so I decided to try again to achieve actual pudding. Another good blogging friend, Flourchild, gave me the heads up that I could try heating my rice soup again rather than starting over, which sounded like a great idea. Unfortunately, the liquid stuff had been sitting in my fridge for close to a week by that point, so I had to toss it. For round two, I cut the milk down to 3 cups instead of 3 1/4 cups, and I cooked it on medium low from the get-go. It gently bubbled away, again for significantly longer than 30 minutes (I did not see Dorie's post on the P&Q until after I made this, but I bet that I cooked it in the 55 minute to one hour range), and by the time I took it out of the pan, it definitely seemed much thicker than it did after my first attempt. I was feeling more optimistic that I'd indeed get pudding this time around. And I did get pudding!

Arborio Rice Pudding: The Pudding Years



This was SO good! The texture (which would have caused me to avoid this dessert in the past) seemed just right to me. The flavor was perfect. I preferred the vanilla to the chocolate. I was going to add in some chambord-soaked somethings to it, but I ran out of time. Maybe next time, because I'll be making this again for sure. Round 2 wasn't ready until Monday night, so I gave some to David as an appetizer before he left for a business dinner (he is getting used to me begging him to eat my desserts at random odd times). He really enjoyed it too. I think that this will be the perfect dessert to take us into our sunset years. Thank you, Isabelle of Les Gourmandises d'Isa, for causing me to take a second look at rice pudding. I'm glad that I did!