Bread Pudding with Lemon and Raisins
From the Kelly Myers collection
| Serves | 8 |
Introduction
Here is a bread-based dessert adapted from Carol Field’s book The Italian Baker. It’s a basic, moist bread pudding that doesn’t call for any hard-to-find ingredients. I’ve served this pudding with only a dusting of powdered sugar and a squeeze of lemon juice. But if you served this with a sauce, such as crème anglaise, it would be a truly rich dessert.
Ingredients
| 14 to 16 | oz. stale white bread | |
| 4¼ | cups whole milk | |
| 5 | Tbsp. unsalted butter | |
| ¾ | cup sugar | |
| 1 | cup dark raisins | |
| 2 | Tbsp. bourbon or rum | |
| 5 | eggs, lightly beaten | |
| ~ | Grated zest of 1 lemon | |
| ¼ | tsp. ground cinnamon | |
| 1 | tsp. vanilla extract | |
| ~ | Unsalted butter for the baking dish | |
| ~ | Powdered sugar | |
| ~ | Lemon wedges |
Steps
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
- Trim the crusts from the bread. Tear or cut the bread into 2-inch pieces and put them in a large mixing bowl. Heat the milk, butter, and sugar just to a boil and pour over the bread. Set aside for 2 hours, occasionally pushing down the pieces of bread to immerse them in the milk.
- Meanwhile, put the raisins and bourbon in a small bowl and add warm water to cover. Let stand until raisins are plump, about 20 minutes. Drain well.
- Squeeze excess milk from the bread and break it up with your hands. Mix in the raisins, eggs, lemon zest, cinnamon, and vanilla.
- Generously butter a 2-quart baking dish. Pour in the bread mixture.
- Bake until the top puffs up slightly and is a light golden brown. Serve warm or at room temperature. To serve, put powdered sugar in a fine meshed sieve and tap the sieve over the pudding, dusting it with sugar until the top is completely white. Serve each portion with a lemon wedge.
Notes
Read more in Kelly Myers’ article about repurposing old bread.
This content is from the Kelly Myers collection.