How to Make Bread Pudding: Classic Bread Pudding Recipe

Bread pudding is a sweet dish consisting of stale bread soaked in a mixture of milk, eggs, sugar, with various mix-ins like raisins or chocolate chips, and baked until tender and crisp around the edges. Chefs often top the dish with creamy vanilla, bourbon, or rum sauce. Serve the dish as a breakfast or brunch food, or pair it with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream as a dessert.

Different kinds of bread bring varying levels of chewiness and crunch to bread pudding. Traditional choices are challah, enriched French bread like brioche, or rustic loaves of sourdough or white bread.

Denser whole-grain breads won’t absorb the milk and eggs the same way, so if you use a loaf like rye bread, adjust the amount of liquid to match.

Bread pudding can be sticky and sweet or subtle and perfumed with spices, perfect for a midday snack. Here’s how to build your own bread pudding:

1. 1. Use stale bread: Like homemade croutons and French toast, bread pudding is a way to use stale or day-old bread. Bread pudding absorbs liquid while maintaining a crisp structure when baked. Fresh bread is often too soft and loses definition when soaked; to dry out fresh bread, arrange the cubes in a single layer on a baking sheet and bake in an oven on low heat for ten minutes until crisp.
2. 2. Use mix-ins: Accent your easy bread pudding with dried fruit like raisins, cranberries, or apricots, chopped nuts like pecans or walnuts, or chocolate chips. (For a warm, boozy kick, soak the dried fruit in brandy or bourbon before adding to the pudding.)
3. 3. Serve with a bread pudding sauce: If you’d like, serve bread pudding with a puddle of crème anglaise or a drizzle of caramel sauce or butterscotch.