Bread Pudding

I thought I would start off with a simple recipe for bread pudding I came up with recently and share some of the recipes which inspired it. I decided to make this as I have left over dried fruits from making a christmas cake. Not to be confused with bread and butter pudding, a bread pudding soaks stale bread with tea or milk before being mixed with dried fruits, sugar, egg and spices and baked. My late nan used to make this and I think it's a recipe that comes from not wanting to waste anything, an attitude that was common particularly with older generations who went through rationing during and after the war.

My nan's recipe was never written down as I think it was just one of those things she knew intuitively how to make. Therefore I needed to make a decent recipe which would resemble the one I remembered from my childhood whilst also putting my own stamp on it. The only thing I knew about her recipe was that she soaked the bread in tea, which confused me when I first started googling as most of the recipes I found involved soaking the bread in milk, although I soon found some tea based recipes as well as ale.

The first recipe I found which looked really yummy was Nigel Slaters, which can be found here. I really enjoy the passion for food he expresses on his tv show and I think anything he puts is name to should taste good. His recipe involves using bread, milk, brown sugar, marmalade, mixed spice, flour, eggs, butter and mixed dried fruits. I suspect my nan's recipe was much simpler than this one, but I like the sound of it.

Delia can always be relied upon for a good recipe, which can be found here. Her variation on the recipe involves soaking the fruit in brandy and like Nigel Slater, she also uses milk to soak the bread.

The first recipe I found that involved the tea was by Dan Lepard and can be found here. He suggests using either ale or tea. He also only uses currants rather than a mix of dried fruits.

The final recipe I thought was worth sharing was one from the Morrisons website here. This one soaks the dried fruit in tea and the bread in milk.

I decided to keep with the tea soaking as that felt more traditional to me. I took the marmalade idea from the slater recipe. I also decided to soak my fruit in rum, like Delia had soaked hers in brandy. In the spirit of it's invention I would not buy anything special for this recipe, just use what you have in the fridge and store cupboard.


Bread Pudding Recipe

Ingredients

250g dried fruit (I used 150g raisins and 100g currants)

Zest of a large orange
4 tbs Rum
225g stale bread

200 ml tea

50 ml milk
80g caster sugar
1 tbs marmalade
1 egg
mixed spice
50g butter

Method

Firstly place your fruit in a bowl with the orange zest, pour over the rum and leave to soak.

Tear the bread into small pieces and pour over the tea and milk. Stir well and leave to soak for ~30 minutes

Preheat the oven to 170 °C. Melt the butter and mix with the marmelade, sugar, egg and mixed spice.

Combine this mix with the bread mixture

Stir in the soaked fruits

Place in a lined tin. Mine was a little big 20 x30cm but it was all I had available, I would recommend a smaller tin approx. 15cm x 20cm. Sprinkle with sugar and bake for 30-40 minutes, a deeper tin will need longer approx 40-60 minutes or until lightly browned on top.

Voila! Bread Pudding.

Future improvements

-Invest in a smaller deeper tin to make thicker pudding.