Bread Pudding with Vanilla Custard Sauce | Bread Pudding Recipe (2024)

FAQs

How do you know when bread pudding is done? ›

Bake about 1 hour or until toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Another way to judge whether the pudding is fully baked, is to gently press down on the center of the pudding. If any custard comes up to the top, the pudding needs to be baked a little longer.

While most custard and pudding recipes both typically call for eggs, the main difference is that pudding uses a starch for thickening, whereas custard's thickening agent is the egg itself (or egg yolk, in most instances). Custard's texture also tends to be firmer than pudding.

A traditional bread pudding sauce is made from just a few simple ingredients: milk, sugar, vanilla extract and cornstarch. Variations of vanilla bread pudding sauce includes rum sauce, bourbon sauce, caramel sauce and lemon sauce.

Place the cubed bread pieces in a bowl and leave the bowl on the counter uncovered for 1 day. Bread pudding can be served warm, room temperature, cold.

Set the bowl, uncovered, in the refrigerator. After 15 minutes, cover the pudding with a sheet of plastic wrap pressed against the surface and refrigerate until fully thickened, about 2 hours. To serve: Whip the thickened pudding with a hand or stand mixer for a full minute to restore its creamy texture.

Bread pudding's magic is how the old, dried bread can be re-invigorated with a mixture of milk, eggs, and sugar that it soaks up like a sponge, but when the eggs aren't properly beaten you have a separation of the beaten yolk from the beaten whites which gives you the scrambled egg look and flavor.

Allow the bread pudding to cool completely after baking. Cover tightly or transfer to a shallow, airtight container. Store in the refrigerator for up to three days.

To prevent horribly runny bread pudding, you also want to warm up the milk before adding it to the other ingredients for easier soaking. Additionally, cover the bread pudding with foil — but only for half of the baking time. This will ensure that the pudding is neither overdone nor underdone.

Better use aluminum

The addition of aluminum foil helps the pudding retain moisture while baking in the oven and may even cause the dessert to steam itself (via Whirlpool). This is a particularly good technique for bread pudding which needs the added moisture to retain its custard's integrity.

Making perfect bread pudding

Since this is a custard dish, we need to treat it as such, thermally. We want bread that is moist throughout, not chewy and dry. And what we don't want from our custard is something that is either undercooked and runny (soggy milk bread anyone?) or overcooked and scrambled-eggy.

Do you eat bread pudding with a spoon or fork? ›

Advice: Ditch the fork – it's completely superfluous – and dig in with the spoon!

Lastly, gently shake the baking dish, and the bread pudding should slightly jiggle. It is on its way to being over-baked if it doesn't move.

So, suffice to say, we understand the importance of getting your bread pudding just right. One major problem that you may have come across is bread pudding that is just too wet. A good bread pudding needs to be moist -- it is made from custard, after all -- but it should not be anywhere close to runny.

It will coat the back of the spoon; test it by running your finger down the spoon. You should wipe a clear, clean line through the custard. Remove from heat. The pudding will thicken more as it cools.

Curdling occurs when the eggs in a pudding are overcooked. For that reason, stove-top puddings are usually thickened with starch and then enriched with eggs.