Challah Bread Pudding Recipe With 4 Sauce Options

Challah bread pudding is sweet, warm, and fluffy bread pudding using challah bread. Challah is an enriched bread, similar to brioche, meaning it has eggs and butter in the dough. However, many challah recipes use oil instead of butter to keep kosher. Challah is soft and chewy with a tender crust, making it a good option for French toast and bread pudding. Challah is slightly sweet, so it complements the flavors of other bread pudding ingredients, like warm spices and brown sugar.

The soft but ideally stale bread soaks up the custard mixture and bakes in a baking dish to cook the custard. The top of the bread pudding is crispy and golden brown, while the inside is moist and fluffy. Serve challah bread pudding with a sauce, fresh whipped cream, or a dusting of powdered sugar. Jump to recipe.

Serve challah bread pudding with any of the four sauces below.

1. 1. Chocolate sauce: Use homemade or store-bought chocolate sauce to add a rich flavor to the challah bread pudding. Depending on how sweet the bread pudding is, a dark or semisweet chocolate sauce offsets the sweetness of the pudding.
2. 2. Crème Anglaise: This French custard is commonly known as the custard that eventually turns into ice cream. However, it is a typical British dessert sauce for things like sticky toffee pudding in its liquid form. It’s sweet, thick, and complementary to the flavors in bread pudding.
3. 3. Salted caramel sauce: Balance the sweetness in a bread pudding with a salty caramel sauce. Make it as salty as desired and drizzle it over the bread pudding while the pudding and caramel sauce are warm.
4. 4. Vanilla sauce: Similar to a crème Anglaise’s flavor but lighter in texture, vanilla sauce combines water, sugar, heavy whipping cream, cornstarch, butter, and vanilla extract or vanilla bean. Use less cornstarch for a thinner sauce that soaks into the bread pudding or more for a thicker sauce that drizzles and sits on top of the pudding.

Use the tips below for making soft and sweet challah bread pudding:

1. 1. Add warm spices to the custard mixture. To balance the sweetness of the custard and the challah bread, add warm spices like ground cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamom to the custard mixture.
2. 2. Cover the bread pudding for at least half the baking time. To prevent the top of the bread pudding from burning during the long baking process, cover the pudding with aluminum foil. Remove the aluminum foil with about fifteen to twenty minutes left in the baking time, so the top of the pudding gets golden brown and crispy.
3. 3. Use day-old challah bread. Challah bread is too soft in its fresh form to work in bread pudding because it would disintegrate after soaking up the custard. Stale bread works much better. Slice a loaf of challah into thick slices, then cut the slices into one-inch cubes. Leave the cubes out on a baking sheet for a few hours or overnight to let them dry out.