Rustic Bread Pudding with Caramel Sauce
Bread pudding is one of my favorite desserts. It is such a treat with caramel sauce and can double as a sweet breakfast. I also love that it uses up stale bread or a leftover loaf that’s crowding the freezer.
Most recipes call for a soft white bread: brioche, challah, or even croissants. But as a baker of crusty sourdough bread, I wanted a recipe that uses the bread I have on hand. I worked on this recipe with various partly whole-grain sourdough loaves (red fife, einkorn and amaranth porridge, and conventional wheat). All batches turned out delicious, and I learned that the key to making these robust breads work for pudding is a long soak in plenty of liquid, and doing some mashing and mixing partway and at the end of the soak. Just a little more patience and effort than regular bread pudding, but with excellent results.
The caramel sauce for this bread pudding is a slight variation on a recipe from the blog Carlsbad Cravings. Of note, it is so good you may want to double it. You can freeze any extra, and that way you use up most or all of a can of evaporated milk.
Rustic Bread Pudding with Caramel Sauce
Bread pudding is such a treat. Every time I see it on a dessert menu, I order it, and I wonder why I do not make it more often myself. Finally, I decided it was time to develop a recipe for bread pudding that works with the crusty artisan bread I make, as well as a recipe for homemade caramel sauce that tempts people to lick their plates. Enjoy!
Ingredients
Bread Pudding
- 800 grams or 10+ cups of cubed/torn crusty bread
- 4 cups of milk
- 6 eggs
- 1 cup sugar
- 5 Tbsp of unsalted butter melted
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1/8 tsp nutmeg
Optional
- 1/2 cup of raisins
- 1 apple peeled and thinly sliced
- ground ginger, cardamom or clove
Caramel Sauce
- 11 Tbsp butter (1 stick plus 3 Tbsp)
- 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar (dark or light both work fine)
- 4-6 ounces of evaporated milk
- 1 Tbsp water
- 1 Tbsp vanilla extract
- 1/4 tsp salt
- Optional
- 1-2 Tbsp bourbon or whisky
Instructions
Bread Pudding
- Grease a rectangular glass baking dish. (I used a narrow and deep 3 qt baker. A wider and shallower baker may require you to drop the cooking time by 10-15 minutes.)
- Spread the bread pieces evenly in the greased baking dish.
- Melt the 5 Tbsp of butter and set aside. (I use the microwave on a low power setting to avoid washing a saucepan.)
- In a 2-3 quart bowl, ideally with a pour spout, mix the eggs and sugar, then add in the milk, vanilla extract, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. Finally mix in the melted butter.
- Gently pour the contents of the bowl over the bread. Use a wide spatula to press the bread downward to soak up more of the liquid.
- Cover and refrigerate for at least 12 hours, removing from the fridge at least once, partway through, in order to mix the bread, mash it down and break it up a little more.
- Preheat your oven to 350 F and remove the baking dish from the fridge. Mix, mash and break up the bread one last time before placing it in the preheated oven to bake.
- Bake for 50-60 minutes, covering with foil for the final 15 minutes if the bread pudding seems to be getting too toasted.
- Let it cool at least 20 minutes before serving with the caramel sauce below, ice cream, or whipped cream.
Caramel Sauce
- In a small saucepan, boil the butter, brown sugar, water, and salt for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.
- Remove from heat, and add the vanilla extract and 4-6 oz of evaporated milk until you reach slightly less than the thickness you prefer. (The caramel sauce will thicken a bit more as it cools.) I used 6 ounces of evaporated milk. If I were adding bourbon, I would use less evaporated milk.
- Pour or funnel the sauce into a jar. This will keep in the fridge for up to a week. Extra sauce can be frozen in
