Recipe Provided By Bill Beck
The origins of this recipe came from my good friend and chef colleague Roger Winthir he found an old Commanders Place recipe for bread pudding and he and I tweaked many times over it till it has become one of our most popular and talked about items at Beck’s Cajun Café at the Reading Terminal Market. As one little old lady put so frankly…its slap you mama good. I could not agree more.
Ingredients:
Custard Mix
10 eggs
2.75 cups Light brown sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
Pinch nutmeg
0.75 tsp pure bourbon vanilla extract
2.5 qt. whole milk
8 cups, cubed French bread (day old or stale)
Faux caramel & Fruit mix
0.50 cup light brown sugar
1 pear sliced
0.25 cup raisins or minced dried fruit
2 tbl water
3 tbs butter (reserve 1 tbl to grease bottom of baking dish)
Equipment needed
9x 12x 1.5 baking dish
chef knife
cutting board
large kitchen spoon
high heat rubber spatula
mixing bowls
wire whisk
measuring spoons
measuring cups
1 qt. sauce pot
oven
Procedure
1) Skin the bread of exterior crust and cube to 3/4/x 3/4 size .(If it is a little over in size don’t worry about it the custard will break down any excessively large pieces as it rests for twenty minute to a half hour before putting in the oven) Set cubed bread aside.
2) Custard: Add eggs to the mixing bowl and mix to combine yolks and white of eggs, add rest of ingredients and mix well. Taste the custard to see if you like the way it tastes. You may want to add a little more of the cinnamon or the nutmeg depending on the age and potency of the products and there source.
3) Faux caramel: Place sauce pot on the stove with the water and sugar on a med flame and mix , when mixture starts to simmer stir continuously for one minute to reduce and marry the sugar and water fully, turn off the flame , remove from the stove and stir gently the butter (2 tbl ) in to the mix. Set aside for a minute.
4) Grease the baking dish with reserved amount of butter you have set aside
5) Leaving the skin on the pears, you will now box cut the pears into 4 pieces…Here’s how. Lay the pear down on your cutting board the fat end towards you. You will take the knife in hand and cut just slightly to the right of the center of the pear just to the right of the steam as well. The goal here is to just miss the core so that we are getting all the useable flesh for our wonderfully homey bread pudding. After cutting you will now have one flat side to the pear, place that flat side downward on your cutting board and repeat same cutting actions again removing yet another piece of pear. Do twice more and you will have nothing put the seeded core of the pear left to discard. The core of the pear if you look at it from top to bottom is now in a box shape. Slice the four remaining pieces of pear into 1/8 thick slice and place on the bottom of the greased baking dish randomly yet evenly. If you need to hold the pears after cutting for any length of time during the prep of this dish hold them in lemon water so they don’t oxidize ( go brown)
6) Pour the faux caramel while it is hot, or at least warm( you want the mix to be pliable so that it can be evenly placed over all the pears , additionally you don’t want to lose any to the bottom of the sauce pot because it has cooled to much) You may need to reheat it.
7) Place bread cubes evenly over the pears/ faux caramel sauce; add custard followed by the raisins. Push the cubed bread into the custard mix so they absorb the custard; do this three times over the next twenty minutes so the bread has evenly absorbed the custard.
Place on center rack of 275 degree pre heated oven for two hours. It is cooked low and slow so that the flavors become concentrated without losing the moister. The top will be light brown and crispy. You can serve this with ice cream, macerated fruit or as we do at Beck’s with a whiskey sauce. Any way you do it, it’s gonna be great, just serve it warm.
