I hate wasting food (as I’m sure you know by now), so I was very chuffed with this recipe from Richard Bertinet’s latest book Crust. He mentioned it in his first book, Dough:
“I love bread and butter pudding – such an English thing! However we do something similar in France, which we used to do in the bakery to use up all the leftovers at the end of the day: croissants, pain au chocolat, you name it, everything would go into a big mixer with sultanas, creme anglaise and some alcohol, until it became a thick paste, which we would bake for about 2 hours, cut up into portions and then dust with sugar. It tasted fantastic.”
When the recipe appeared in his second book, how could I resist trying it?
Actually, it’s more a process than a recipe.
Firstly, gather together all the bits of bread, cake and pastry floating around your kitchen. I had chocolate sweet dough rolls, some pain viennois, a few slices of sourdough bread and a sliver of yoghurt cake. Bertinet says that you need a good mix of pastry and bread to make this work well. All up you should have about 500g of baked leftovers. Break all of these up and put them into a large food processor, then blitz them until they’re broken up and grainy.
Tip the crumbled mix into a large bowl with 200g sultanas (I suspect any dried fruit would work), 5 tablespoons of rum and 300g pastry cream (if you’re making the pastry cream from scratch, make a half batch). Stir well to combine. Mine looked a little dry (I was a tad short on the pastry cream), so I added a splash of pouring cream as well.
Turn the mixture into a lined baking tin – I used an 8″/20cm square that was probably a bit too large. A smaller pan will give you a thicker pudding consistent with the photo in Bertinet’s book.
Bake in a preheated 175C fan assisted oven for 35 – 45 minutes, until the top is crisp and well browned. Allow to cool, then dredge with icing sugar before serving.
Note: given that the original description mentioned “creme anglaise”, you might be able to substitute microwave custard for the pastry cream.
I absolutely adore the French mentality of never wasting anything! Pete loved Le Pudding and I’m completely charmed by the idea that it will change every single time I make it, depending on the baked flotsam of the day. This particular incarnation tasted like a cross between boiled fruit cake and bread and butter pudding!
Sigh. I think we might have a crush on the Frenchman. Even Pete commented, as he picked up his third piece of Le Pudding, “Richard has never let us down, has he?”
. . . . .
Since my first draft of this post, I’ve made this recipe again, this time in a 7″ square pan. It was completely different (but equally as delicious), because my leftovers this time included the apricot danish I’d made on the weekend, some leftover pound cake and a rye sourdough loaf. I love how flexible this recipe is! I made a half batch of pastry cream as I didn’t have any on hand – but it took only a few minutes in the microwave.
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 
I would call this bread pudding. Bread and Butter pudding is a different creature all together……made with buttered bread. or brioche/croissant/whatever, layered in a bowl with sultanats, sugar and spices, and then egg custard is poured over the top and it is baked.
A different creature entirely! But equally yummy.
My father used to make bread pudding, with stale bread….and would get us kids to moosh it through our fingers to break it up, once it has been soaking in milk…..
i just remember the warm smell in our kitchen!
Thanks Emma – I’d never heard of bread pudding until now – have just had a look on wiki. Did your dad use stale cake as well, or just bread? I wonder if every culture has some way of using up stale bread – I know the Italians make a wonderful bread salad called panzanella, which I love. Hmmm. Might make that for lunch today.. :)
Looks delicious!!
The brownies were nice too.
Bread and butter pudding is very very rich and filling and has crunchy corners usually, where the little corners of the bread triangles stick up and get toasty. It’s tastes like a cross between fried bread and eggy toast, with raisins and custard on top. I associate it with school dinners in the sixties. That and spotted dick of course. I think we had bread pudding too, but it didn’t look like nearly as good as yours! It was just white bread based I suspect.
I also have been baking with great success from Richard Bertinets “Crust”. Have always been tempted to bake “Le puddding” but didn’t until tonight… OH MY GOODNESS!!!! Yum!!!
Our “Le Pudding” included leftover sourdough loaf ends, crossaints, brioche and fruit bread.
Your pastry creme instructions were just perfect.
Many thanks
PHil
Phil, that’s fantastic! Thanks for letting me know. Bertinet’s books are just great – do you have Dough as well? I love that your Pudding would have been completely different to ours (and probably more luscious with all the croissant and brioche loaves).
The pastry cream and microwave custard recipes (and the lemon curd) are just a little too easy to make. Today I’ve been trying to make nougat and we had a couple of leftover yolks. It took literally a few minutes to turn them into vanilla custard which then morphed into vanilla and meringue icecream. Big Boy happily scoffed a big bowl for dessert.. :)
Cheers, Celia
Celia, I have seen ‘Dough’ in shops but have yet to outlay for it.
Yeah, our ‘Le Pudding’ is pretty decadent, and its not very often that we have any brioche left over that I would want to use…..brioche is my favourite thing in the world – my Saturday morning treat dipped in coffee.
Phil
Phil, I actually think Dough is the better book, particularly if you’re interested in breadmaking. I find I use it all the time, and the sweet bread recipe in Dough makes a nice pretend brioche. Do you make your own brioche, btw? If so, kudos to you – last time I tried I blew up my Kenwood and had to get a new one! :)
Celia
Celia, I have made quite a few brioche loaves and the smaller Brioche à tête – which are great for portion control :) – getting better at shaping them.
Whew, Kenwoods are hard to kill – Ours would have to be 20 years old. I mix our bread by hand, can keep the mess to a bare minimum now, was a very different story when I first started….flour EVERYWHERE!!!
Phil, the one I blew up was my mother’s – she had received it as a 21st birthday present 43 years before. It had a good run! :)
It’s always good to meet a fellow bread baker – my mission is to get everyone baking their own bread. If only people realised how simple it can really be, no-one would be paying $7/loaf to buy it.
We are up in Bris Vegas, so I am a regular at our local organic shop picking bags of flour from them….delivery service would be great though….maybe a little too handy:)
I think bread making has passed from a hobby to a natural part of the way our house runs. I can’t imagine not having a fresh loaf on the counter and maybe another in the freezer ready when needed (Our kids churn through a huge amount with school lunches and breakfast) … there is still something magical watching a blob of water, flour and salt rise in the oven and turn golden brown .
Phil, I completely understand what you’re saying. I went off on a tangent about this in an earlier post. There is something just so comforting about the routine of bread baking.
I’m trying bogus croissants today (using Bertinet’s sweet dough recipe) – wish me luck! :)