The Best Blueberry Bread Pudding - Food Wishes

[Music] hello this is chef john from foodwishes.com with the best blueberry bread pudding that's right this comforting crowd pleaser is not only super easy to make it will pretty much work with any seasonal fruit you like to use and at the risk of jinxing you i will say this is virtually impossible to mess up and by the way i threw in that jinx part in case you do mess it up at least you'll be able to blame me so with that let's go ahead and get started by slicing up one loaf of bread and i'm gonna try to get these slices somewhere between a quarter and a half inch thick which i believe is also known as three eighths of an inch and while this will pretty much work with any french or italian loaf of bread i do recommend using a sourdough since that little bit of tanginess is going to work so well with the sweetness of the fruit in the custard and yes in case you're wondering i am going to put a piece of salami on this end piece and by the way in a perfect world this bread will be very stale and dry already which in my case is not the case so after i finish slicing this i'm going to go ahead and dry this out in the oven and yes i could have used two pans so they're not overlapped but that's really not a problem especially since i'm going to turn them over maybe halfway through the drying process and then all i'm going to do is go ahead and transfer that into a 350 degree oven but as soon as i do i'm going to turn off the heat and i'm just going to let it sit in the oven for like three or four hours and which one it should be very close to bone dry and that's it once we have our stale bread set or at least our bread set to be stale we can move on to the batter which is nothing more than a very simple custard which is going to start with four whole eggs plus four egg yolks and if we don't feel like separating we can just do this with six whole eggs but i think the texture is nicer with the yolks and yes don't worry i see that eggshell and it will be gone when we transition to the next shot and then to our eggs we will add a nice big pinch of salt a little touch of white sugar as well as a little bit of brown sugar which for whatever reason seems to work really well with blueberries all right it's probably the molasses in there and then what we'll do is grab a whisk and start mixing this very enthusiastically until the mixture turns from something that's kind of a deep gold color and fairly grainy into something much lighter and much fluffier and not grainy and don't bother getting your electric mixer all dirty right this is only going to take you about a minute plus doing it by hand is going to raise our heart rate so we got that going for us which is nice and that's it once our mixture looks a little something like this we can stop and we'll add the rest of the ingredients and those will include some real pure vanilla extract and please accept no substitutes we will also add some cinnamon which is another thing that seems to pair perfectly with blueberries and then we'll also include a little bit of freshly grated lemon zest at which point we'll finish this off with some whole milk as well as some heavy cream and some recipes use all one or the other but to me a combination gives our custard the perfect level of richness and then once all that's been transferred in we'll go ahead and give this a quick mix with our whisk before we transfer in our style dry and as you can hear very hard bread oh yeah bowl don't lie and then what we'll do is kind of toss this around until it starts to soften up at which point we can kind of press it down with our hands submerging it down into the batter the best we can and if everything goes according to plan this amount of custard batter should be almost fully absorbed by a one pound loaf of bread and by the way that only works if it's stale right we want that bread to be 100 custard which will not happen if the bread still has moisture in it so as we say in the business if it's not dry it's not fly and then what we'll do once we have that pressed down as shown is let it sit absorbing that custard for at least 20 minutes during which we can give it the occasional pressing down and since i got tired of washing my hands i went ahead and used a spatula and then once our bread has been sufficiently soaked i like to do one optional step and that would be to pull out maybe seven or eight still somewhat intact slices that i will use to finish the top and fair warning after sitting in the custard for 20 minutes that bread is pretty much gonna fall apart which is fine that's what we want but i'm usually able to grab a few slices off the top and i'm gonna show you what i do with those very shortly and then once that's set the only thing we have left to do is generously butter our casserole dish and i do mean generous do not be shy with the butter and then what we'll do once our baking dish has been extremely and thoroughly greased is we will transfer in roughly half the total amount of our soaked bread and like i said it's going to be very much falling apart at this point but that is exactly what we want to happen in fact if this was still in slices i would tell you to break it up since we really do want to have tons of nooks and crannies for our blueberries to fall into so like i said we'll go ahead and transfer in about half of our total amount of soap bread making sure we have a very even but highly irregular layer on top of which we can now transfer one pound of the best blueberries you can find and then we'll take our fingertips and kind of poke that down into those nooks and crannies and that's it once our fruit layer is done we go ahead and transfer over the rest of the bread in the bowl and we'll distribute that nice and evenly before topping this with those partially intact slices and again if you want to skip that optional step feel free a completely irregular and gnarly top is very traditional and will still look fantastic but this is how i learned to do it at a brunch restaurant i worked at many many decades ago and i always liked how it looked so that's how i do it but you suit yourself i mean you are after all the kooba gooding of your bread pudding and speaking of juniors you can if you want to also do this in individual-sized ramekins and that's actually a pretty good strategy if you only want to make a few portions but anyway once we've finished off that top layer whether it's whole slices like i'm doing or just chunks we'll want to make sure to transfer on any of that excess batter and then to finish this off before it goes in the oven i'm going to go ahead and apply a generous amount of melted butter to the top and suggest you do the same and some people also like to sprinkle over some sugar on top of the butter which i've done before but this time i decided not to since this is going to be plenty sweet enough and it should bake up into a beautiful golden brown whether we do or not and that's it once that's set we'll go ahead and transfer that onto a sheet pan since there is a real possibility of a bubble over so we should probably play it safe and that's it that is now ready to transfer into the center or at least the upper center of a 375 degree oven for about an hour or until it's puffed up and beautifully browned and hopefully looks like this and then as hard as it might be we really do need to let this sit for at least 20 minutes a half hour before we even think of serving this up and while this sits and cools it will deflate a little bit and sort of sink down into the dish and we kind of if we want to help that by pressing down with a spatula but don't press too hard otherwise you're going to squeeze those juices up over the sides and that's not where we want them we want those stained in our bread pudding so i went ahead and let mine cool down given it a press occasionally while i waited at which point i removed it from the pan and then went ahead and served it up which personally i think you should do at room temperature or just barely barely warm right for me this was still a little too hot to serve but it was getting near the end of the day and the light was nice so i grabbed a spoon and served some up anyway and i proceeded to garnish with a nice dollop of whipped cream which is totally and absolutely unnecessary and i only did that so i could garnish with a sprig of mint which is also totally and absolutely unnecessary but as you might know i'm contractually obligated to take some pictures but anyway you garnish or don't garnishes you see fit and after taking the aforementioned pictures i went ahead and dug in and as you might know or have noticed i'm actually shooting in a new kitchen and i haven't quite figured out where to stand for the best eating shots and right here i'm trying to eat some from behind so as not to block the shots but that didn't go very well so i switched to the side approach which worked out a lot better but i am totally burying the lead which is that this blueberry bread pudding was absolutely magnificent right this had the perfect amount of sweetness the perfect level of richness and the perfect ratio between soft custardy bread that crispy brown buttery bread on the top and sides and of course our gorgeous fruits right i could not have been more happy with how this came out other than like i already said it was still a touch too hot for me i just think you taste all the elements better if it's just slightly warm and even though i kind of made fun of it that little bit of whipped cream on the top was kind of nice although to be honest a couple bites in i was wishing it was a little scoop of vanilla ice cream in case you needed one extra serving suggestion but anyway that's it what i'm calling the best blueberry bread pudding mostly because nobody can prove otherwise but also i do actually believe it i really do think this is the perfect formula and should work out just about the same no matter what seasonal fruit you decide to feature so for those reasons and more i really do hope you give this a try soon so please follow the links below for the ingredient amounts a printable written recipe and much more info as usual and as always enjoy you

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 272,310

Keywords: Bread, Pudding, Blueberry, dessert, breakfast, brunch, summer, fast, easy, recipe, chef, john, food, wishes, cooking

Id: FGbXAPbeGP4

Length: 9min 47sec (587 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021