Recipe Roadtest: Sultana Bread Pudding

In deciding what to bake this weekend, our main consideration was that the finished product be soft, as my sister had just gotten braces put on her teeth. Fortunately, earlier in the week, we had been watching an episode of the highly entertaining Jonathan Phang’s Gourmet Express, and on one of his train stops, he embarked on a bread and butter pudding bake-off with a Michelin-starred chef. Inspiration struck and we came across a sultana bread pudding recipe in my Margaret Fulton Baking cookbook. We’ve adapted it slightly, but it still came out golden and delicious.

Sultana Bread Pudding

What you’ll need:

• 3.5 cups of milk
• 1 vanilla bean, or 1 teaspoon vanilla essence
• butter, softened for spreading
• 6 slices thick raisin bread
• 3 eggs, or 5 egg yolks
• 75g caster sugar
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• ground cinnamon

What to do:

1. Scald the milk with the vanilla bean (for three different methods of scalding milk, see here – we used the double boiler method) and simmer for 15 minutes. Cool, then discard the vanilla bean, or add the vanilla essence. 

2. While the milk is cooling, butter one side of each slice of bread. Cut each slice into triangle quarters and arrange in a greased 2-litre ovenproof dish, buttered sides down. 

3. Beat the eggs or yolks with the sugar and salt and stir in the scalded vanilla milk. Pour over the bread in the dish and let stand for 30min. 

4. Sprinkle with cinnamon. Place the dish in a roasting tin and pour hot water into the tin until it comes halfway up the sides of the dish. Bake for an hour or until a knife inserted in the centre comes out clean. Serve warm and enjoy with cream or ice cream!

With the chilly winter weather that has descended on Sydney, this is the perfect dessert to warm you up. My sister was very pleased with the results, declaring that the pudding melted in her mouth and “did not even require chewing”.

Notes:

• We left the bread crusts on, but most recipes get you to slice them off. It didn’t make much difference to the texture of the pudding, as the bread is soaked and baked for long enough, so the crusts end up quite soft.
• Keep an eye on the pudding while it is baking and place a sheet of aluminium foil over the dish to avoid burning the top – ours did burn, but we were able to strip the blackened crusts off (so keeping the crusts on came in handy!) and continue baking, with a sheet of foil covering the dish.
• We did have to pack the bread triangles quite tightly in the dish and even then, we had extra, which we ended up squeezing in the middle of the dish, crust side up. You may need to adjust the number of bread slices or the size of the baking dish you use. Or else, just get creative with how you arrange the slices!
• The original recipe called for ground nutmeg to sprinkle over the top, but as we didn’t have any, we went with cinnamon.