Berkshire Eagle Column: Taking Bread & Chocolate a Step Beyond!

I know this week’s recipe highlights a product from a local bakery, but let it serve as inspiration! Even if you are not in the Berkshires, find a local, artisanal bakery, buy an interesting loaf, and try making bread pudding with similar proportions.

Follow this link for this week’s column in the Berkshire Eagle, or just scroll down!

BERKSHIRE TREASURES

by Elizabeth Baer

For a period of time when I was a child, my father was a partner in a Wall Street law firm. (He also served in the US Attorney’s office and as a state and federal judge, but I digress.) If you know anything about the New York City legal world, you know it is intense and stressful, and too much of my dad’s vacation time was spent working, so much so that one year he ended up hospitalized with heart problems.

My mother (whose father had been a cardiologist so she knew from heart problems) put her foot down and said, “That’s it! We are going far enough away for vacation that they won’t contact you!” (Of course, this was in the days before email and cell phones. This effort is much more challenging today!)

As a result, for a few years, my parents used the Vacation Exchange Club – an early iteration of the Airbnb concept – to find rental properties in Europe for a month. One year this meant we spent July in a lovely “mother-in-law” apartment on the outskirts of Paris.

Seeing that there were two young children in the family – my sister and I were 10 and 13 at the time – the owners of the property told my parents about a day camp in town where they could just sign us up for random days here and there, whenever they wanted to enjoy a day in Paris without kids. And so, though we knew little French, my parents dropped us off. It certainly was an interesting experience, but what I remember most – no surprise – is the food they served. The hot lunch might include fish with a lemon butter sauce or coq au vin, and our morning and afternoon snack was often a hunk broken off a baguette with a piece of dark chocolate shoved into it.

Our local Berkshire Mountain Bakery, one of the wonderful artisanal producers we have here in the Berkshires, does this one better with their Bread & Chocolate loaf, which always reminds me of those snacks at our French day camp. The bread is a hearty, chewy sourdough with a veritable overabundance of large dark chocolate chunks mixed in! Excellent on its own, it’s also sublime in French toast. But my favorite recipe with this decadent treat makes it even more so as bread pudding.

This recipe calls for half a loaf, enough for dessert and leftovers with just the two of us, but it can certainly be doubled using a bigger pan.

BREAD & CHOCOLATE BREAD PUDDING

Serves 4

INGREDIENTS:

• Cooking spray or butter for greasing the pan

• ½ loaf Berkshire Mountain Bakery Bread & Chocolate, sliced, slices halved, about 9 ounces (or 6-7 ounces other sourdough bread plus ½ cup chocolate chunks, about 3 ounces)

• 1½ cups milk

• ½ cup heavy cream

• 2 eggs

• ¼ cup sugar

• ½ teaspoon vanilla

• 1 tablespoon vanilla sugar (optional)

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a shallow baking dish or gratin pan, just large enough to hold the bread in about two layers, with cooking spray or butter.

Arrange the bread pieces in the prepared baking dish. Combine milk, cream, and eggs and whisk well to combine.

Pour custard mixture over the bread. Allow to soak for 30-45 minutes, pressing down from time to time with a spatula to help all the pieces soak up the custard.

Sprinkle the vanilla sugar over the top of the bread pudding, if using.

Bake for 40-45 minutes until the custard is fully set. Serve warm with ice cream, whipped cream, or caramel sauce.