TWO BREAD PUDDING RECIPES
One bread pudding uses any “quick bread”—such as banana bread, zucchini bread, banana-zucchini bread, or the like—while the other uses up stale panettone, the Italian brioche-like bread often seen at year’s end holidays all over the world. (And read about the word “panettone”—and other Italian words such as “padrone” or “rigatoni”—and its very big and important suffix, “-one.”)
A gratin dish replete with Panettone Bread Pudding.
RECIPE: Panettone Bread Pudding
Panettone including chocolate pieces doesn’t do as well in this recipe as the more traditional sort, that is, one with raisins and candied fruit pieces only; serves 8-12
Ingredients
1 panettone, 2 pounds minimum, torn into 1-inch or slightly larger pieces
4 large eggs
8 egg yolks
5 cups half and half
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1/2 cup light brown sugar
3-4 tablespoons unsalted butter or ghee, softened
Directions
Place the shredded panettone on a large cookie sheet that has been lined with parchment paper and brown the pieces in a 350-degree oven until slightly dried out but not toasted, at least 15 minutes. Set aside to dry further.
In a large bowl, whip together the eggs, egg yolks and the remaining ingredients except the butter, setting the custard aside to allow the sugar to dissolve.
Generously line with the butter or ghee a large gratin or other deep baking dish large enough to accommodate all the panettone pieces and the custard. Put the panettone pieces in the dish, pressing down and packing lightly, then slowly pour in the egg and cream mixture, pressing lightly again to loosen out any large air pockets.
Refrigerate the bread pudding overnight, covered in aluminum foil. When ready to cook, remove from the refrigerator 1 hour ahead of baking time, retaining the foil cover.
Heat the oven to 350 degrees and place a large, deep roasting pan on the middle rack. Set to boil some water. Place the covered baking or gratin dish in the roasting pan and add enough boiling water to come up halfway the sides of the bread pudding pan.
Bake for 1 hour covered, then remove the foil, lower the oven temperature to 325 degrees, and bake again for an additional 1 hour, or until the pudding is nicely browned and the custard is set (your oven or elevation may require additional baking time, especially for the custard to cook through).
Serve, sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar if desired, but certainly with plenty of unsalted butter and warmed maple syrup.
A serving of bread pudding made from a Pumpkin Quick Bread.
RECIPE: Quick Bread Bread Pudding
Serves 4-6.
Ingredients
1/2 loaf quick bread, very stale, cut into 1-inch cubes (about 6-7 cups)
2 large eggs
4 egg yolks
2 and 1/2 cups half and half
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup light brown sugar
1/4 cup golden raisins
2 tablespoons unsalted butter or ghee, softened
Directions
If the bread is not stale, dry the bread, sliced thickly or cut into cubes, for 1-2 days on cooling racks in the open air. You may dry the bread cubes more quickly by laying them on a large cookie sheet that has been lined with parchment paper and putting them in a 350-degree oven until slightly dried out but not toasted, at least 15 minutes. Set aside to dry further.
In a large bowl, whip together the eggs, egg yolks and the remaining ingredients except the raisins and butter, setting the custard aside to allow the sugar to dissolve.
Generously line, with the butter or ghee, a large gratin or other deep baking dish large enough to accommodate all the bread pieces and the custard. Put the stale bread cubes in the dish, pressing down and packing lightly, and evenly sprinkle the golden raisins over the top. Slowly pour in the egg and cream mixture, pressing lightly again to loosen out any large air pockets.
Cover the baking dish with aluminum foil (or the dish’s own cover) and let the bread pudding sit, outside the refrigerator, for at least 1 hour. (Overnight is OK, too.)
Heat the oven to 350 degrees after placing a metal baking sheet on the middle rack. Bake for 20 minutes covered, then remove the foil or cover, lower the oven temperature to 325 degrees, and bake again for an additional 30-40 minutes, or until the pudding is nicely browned and the custard is set. (Your oven or elevation may require additional baking time, especially for the custard to cook through. It is OK if the center of the pudding is a bit jiggly.)
Serve, warm or at room temperature, sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar if desired, but certainly with plenty of more unsalted butter, warmed maple syrup or honey.
A bread pudding made with an iced pumpkin-spice quick bread.
Wine Pairings and Why: Odd as it seems, sweet foods are the most difficult to pair with wine. Sweetness, as one or more sugars such as fructose or sucrose, combines with the majority of wines (themselves dry) to cause sensations on the tongue of bitterness, astringency and acidity. Drink a dry white Burgundy with vanilla ice cream and discover a terrible experience. But if you pair the level of sugar in the food with a corresponding (or slightly higher) level of sweetness in the wine, that works. A good example is pairing an apple tart with a medium-sweet muscat. But the overall guideline is that sweetness in food requires the same level of sweetness in wine. With some moderately sweet desserts, that wine would be a Moscato from Italy or this country or a Piedmontese Brachetto d’Acqui. With very sweet desserts, a Port, or a Bordeaux Sauternes, or even a Bual or Malmsey Madeira from Portugal.
On “-one” [oh-nay] in Italian
A short lesson here in some of the Italian language, as an acquaintance on the way to better cooking. Plus, Italian just sounds so delicious.
In English, when we wish to say something is big or small, we use those very adjectives, as in “no big deal.” In Italian, you can do that too (there’s a line of wines, for example, labeled “Gran Passione”), but more often, an Italian will append a suffix to a noun to say that a thing is bigger or smaller than its root.
Diminutive (“to make small”) suffixes include “-etto” and “-ino”; the most common augmentative (“to augment or make large”) suffix is “-one” (pronounced, in Italian, “oh-nay”).
So, “spago,” the word for “string” gives us “spaghetto” (singular, “little string”) or, as we know the name of the pasta in the plural, spaghetti, “little strings.” A thicker version of spaghetti is spaghettoni, or “bigger little strings.”
My favorite long-form noodle is bucatini, from “buca” for “hole” and the adjective “bucato,” holed (or, more properly, “bored,” as in hollowed out, like a tunnel). Bucatini are noodles with little bored-out tunnels. I like bucatini because it delivers on a particularly pleasurable version of “al dente.” Some of the boiling water snuggles in via the bore and cooks the noodle simultaneously from both inside as well as outside the pasta.
Many more forms of pasta, long and short, use either a diminutive or augmentative suffix to get at the meaning of the shape: orecchiette (from “orecchio,” ear, hence “small ears”); rigatoni (from “rigato,” ruled or furrowed, or “big furrowed ones”); or tortellini (from “torta,” cake or pie, hence “tortello,” small pie,” to tortellini, “very small pies”).
Christmastime in Italy is the season of the panettone, a wonderful sweet cake that gets its name all the way back to the Latin for bread, “panis.” Then to the Italian “pane” (bread), and “panetto” (little bread, roll, or sometimes cake), to “panettone,” or “rather big cake,” but not merely in size (although it typically is that), but in importance, richness, nobility.
Panettone originated in Italy’s Lombardy region, specifically the capital city there, Milan. In contradistinction to the cooking of the historically less wealthy, less profligate South (with the notable outlier of Sicily), the list of panettone’s ingredients is like the contents of a safe-deposit box: wheat (instead of millet or barley, as in the South), eggs, raisins, candied fruit (using that rare-in-its-time commodity, sugar), yeast (as opposed to a sourdough starter that’s been in a farmer’s family forever), butter (versus olive oil), and even saffron, if you really wanted to splurge. No saffron in the South.
In addition, a good panettone takes two to three days to make (a couple of lengthy risings explain that), whereas a loaf of simple peasant bread is merely that day’s work.
Panettone gets its exalted status because it started out that way. Adding eating it on the occasion of the birth of the Christ Child is a fillip.