Chocolate Bread Pudding (Page 828)

• Date: Saturday, August 26, 2006 - 9pm
• Location: Southborough, MA
• Kitchen: Richard and Anita's House
• Fellow Chef: Chris
• Dining Companions: Richard, Anita, and Michael
• Recipe Rating: B

I have hardly made anything from the "Puddings, Custard, Mousses, and Souffles" section of the book, so I made this one to catch up a bit. This bread pudding was pretty good. Its only major flaw was that the bread didn't absorb quite enough of the custard. Richard pointed out that if the cubes of bread had been smaller, it likely would have worked better. That would certainly be one fix. The real problem was that I didn't have day-old bread. I followed the tip from The Book on how to dry out fresh bread to make it similar to day-old bread. I don't think it worked very well though. I ended up drying for twice as long as The Book suggested, and still it wasn't dry enough. So, the bread was too moist to absorb enough custard to make this dessert really good. The chocolate flavor was excellent though -- rich and intense, but not overwhelming.

This is the 216th recipe I have completed, out of 1293, so I am now more than one sixth done with my project! Yay! Completing one sixth of the project took slightly less than 8 months. At that pace I should finish in December 2009! Alex added a feature to the project index which computes what percentage of the recipes I have made from each of the 21 sections of The Book (to see it, click on Project Index to the right and then scroll all the way down). I think it will be very helpful in selecting recipes - it may even prevent me from having to make 7 kinds of mayonaise in the last month of the project! When I make a big meal I am going to try to select one recipe from the section with the lowest percentage. That should keep me on track a little bit!