Albondigas

Sometimes when I come across an interesting recipe I decide I want to make that dish, research a bunch of variations and then come up with my own version. But sometimes I'll notice that I've got everything I need for the recipe in the house and skip all that and just make it.

I found a link to this recipe on TheKitchn.com, but it was a link to a link to a reposting of a recipe from a cookbook so all the context and explanation was missing. That should have been a warning sign, but I guess I wasn't in a mindset to be warned. I didn't look at variations and didn't even look at the context. I just thought: "I didn't know albóndigas had oatmeal in them." and went ahead with it. As you may know, they don't. This recipe is from Almost Meatless, a cookbook by Joy Manning and Tara Mataraza Desmond, where they switched out bread crumbs and reduced the amount of meat. The oats add bulk and absorb flavors. If they had left it at that then I may well have tried the recipe even if I had done my due diligence; it's a clever idea. But they made a bunch of other changes that I don't get. I'll explain later, but first the recipe.

Albóndigas
- serves 4 to 6 -
from Almost Meatless by Joy Manning and Tara Mataraza Desmond

Ingredients:
1/2 cup steel-cut oatmeal
1/2 cup loosely packed fresh cilantro leaves, chopped plus more for garnish
4 cloves garlic, minced (about 2 tablespoons), divided
1 chipotle in adobo sauce, seeded and chopped into a paste
4 teaspoons ground cumin, divided
2 teaspoons ground coriander, divided
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 pound ground lamb
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 small onion, cut into 1/4-inch dice (about 1 cup)
1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes
1 cup water
Juice of 1 lime

Procedure:
1. Mix together the oatmeal, cilantro, half the garlic, the chipotle, 2 teaspoons of the cumin, 1 teaspoon of the coriander, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/4 teaspoon pepper in a bowl. Gently work the lamb into the mixture, distributing it evenly. Form balls out of tablespoon-size scoops of the mixture and set aside.

2. Heat the oil in a Dutch oven or a large pot over medium-high heat. Add the onion and saute for 5 minutes. Stir in the remaining garlic, cumin, and coriander, cooking for an additional 30 seconds. Add the tomatoes and water and stir to combine.

3. Bring the sauce to a simmer and add the meatballs. Simmer partially covered for 45 minutes.

4. Season the sauce with salt and pepper to taste, squeeze the lime juice over top, and serve with extra chopped cilantro.






From all the oats floating around the bowl, it appears I've suffered critical meatball failure during simmering. The meatballs that remain are crumbly which isn't too surprising considering the chunky bits they're made of and the lack of binder. Most every other albóndiga recipe has an egg in there. I think maybe the recipe was expecting little broken bits of oats instead of the big chunks in the McCann's brand oatmeal I used. I probably should have chopped my cilantro finer; that can't have helped. I suppose I could break up the rest and call this chili.

I'm a bit disappointed that I'm not getting more lamb flavor here. There's a bit of anonymous meatiness in there, but mainly it's all tomato, cumin, cilantro and less chipotle than you'd expect, but I did use a small one. Frying the meatball before simmering, which most Spanish albóndigas recipes do, would have helped. So would using more strongly flavored beef or pork which are far more common.

I wonder; what with the chipotle, cilantro and lime; if this is a take on a Mexican meatball. The cumin, coriander and lamb are typical of the Moorish origins of the tapas version (each of those isn't unheard of in Mexican cooking, but they're a very Mediterranean combination). Even if all the spices were Mexican, the tomato sauce is very much a Spanish element. It all just seems incoherent and, for me, it doesn't really work.

Incoherence aside, it's not actively unpleasant to eat. Not high praise, but that's all this dish is going to get.

Bacon cheddar chive scones

Are savory scones unusual? I don't recall ever encountering such a thing before but now that I've done a search, I see lots of different recipes for cheese scones. There are even a handful of distinct recipes for bacon cheddar scones, most with either scallions or chives. The particular one I made originally called for scallions, but the chives in my herb garden have been growing well so I wanted to use them. This recipe is from the Atlantic's new food section of their website. They've had some pretty interesting recipes there recently and I find Grant Achatz's column about introducing experimental new dishes at his restaurant quite fascinating. It's worth taking a look.

But getting back to the recipe, this is the first time I've ever made scones. From all the awful scones I've had, I had always assumed they were very difficult to make, but these came out beautifully first try.

Bacon Cheddar Scones
Makes 12 small scones

8 ounces sliced high quality peppery smoked bacon [If your bacon isn't peppered, add some pepper]
2½ cups all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon fine sea salt [I have no fine salt in the house so I ground up coarse sea salt in a mortar)
¾ cup high quality [European-style or organic] unsalted butter, cut into ½-inch pieces, cold
2 large eggs, beaten, cold
½ cup plus 2 tablespoons heavy cream, cold
4 ounces cheddar, aged at least one year, crumbled and cold
3 scallions, chopped

1. Fry the bacon over medium heat until crisp. Drain, chop, and place in refrigerator to cool.

2. Preheat oven to 375°F.

3. Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt into a large mixing bowl. Cut in the butter with a knife or pastry cutter until the mixture forms ½-inch pieces. [I just used my fingers and the texture I got at the end was more sandy than anything I'd call "pieces". Could someone who understands baking better than I do please explain the significance of the difference?]

4. Add the eggs, ½ cup of the cream, and cheddar. Mix by hand [well, by whisk held in your hand] until just combined. Fold in the scallions [or chives] and cooled bacon. [This I did with my hands.]

5. Transfer the dough to a well-floured board. Form two 7-inch rounds. Cut each into 6 wedges.

6. Transfer the wedges to a baking sheet lined with parchment. Brush with the remaining cream and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, [I went all the way to 30 minutes, but baking in my oven often goes long.] until the scones are golden brown on the top and bottom (you'll have to lift them off the baking sheet a bit to check underneath).

7. Allow to cool and firm up for about 10 minutes before removing from sheet. Serve the same day [or, I'm hoping, freezing is OK. I haven't defrosted any to check how they're holding up yet.]


The author, Ari Weinzweig, suggests serving these with butter or bacon fat or mayonaise with tomato and arugula. I liked Chef Allan's Mango Tears chutney as an accompaniment.


These are crisp on the outside, soft and not-quite-crumbly not-quite-flaky on the inside. They're smokey, savory and sharp with a subtle herbal note keeping the richness from overwhelming. The best bits were where a piece of cheese was exposed and melted and browned over the surface. If you make these, sprinkle a little finely shredded cheese over top. Really quite lovely and a fine thing to have around as a snack. I think I'll try a sweet scone next as those would be pretty nice to have around as well.

Kederok and Tahu Kering

I mail ordered a bunch of Indonesian ingredients a couple months ago and then promptly stopped cooking anything Indonesian. But Indonesian cuisine has evolved for the sort of oppressively tropical weather we've been having so now's definitely the time to break it out.

I don't know how useful it is to you guys for me to post about dishes that require ingredients you don't have, but I suppose my conception of a food blog as a practical rather than a voyeuristic endeavor is something of a minority view. For whatever it's worth then, here's a west Javanese salad and an east Javanese tofu dish both from The Indonesian Kitchen.

Kederok

1 fresh semihot chile, thinly sliced
1 clove garlic, sliced
1 teaspoon salt
2 small slices dried kencur, soaked in water for 30 minutes [a.k.a. lesser galangal. I was going to use some regular galangal as I haven't been able to get kencur, but it didn't soften enough smush in the mortar. I used a little ginger instead which is a fair approximation.]
3 Tablespoons crunchy peanut butter [I've got smooth so I added some coarsely ground peanuts I keep around for garnishing.]
1 teaspoon tamarind, dissolved in 1 Tablespoon water
2 teaspoons sugar
1 cup thin-sliced cucumbers
1 cup bean sprouts
1 cup lettuce, broken into bite-size pieces [I have no lettuce either so I used a cup and a half of cukes and an equal amount of sprouts.]

1. Crush chile, garlic, salt, kencur and peanut butter in a mortar.

2. Strain seeds out of tamarind. Add tamarind and sugar to peanut butter mix.

3. Toss sauce with vegetables until well mixed. Served chilled or room temperature.


Tahu Kering

12 ounces tofu
1/2 cup high smoke point oil for frying
2 cloves garlic, sliced
1/4 cup onion, sliced
2 semihot red chiles, sliced thin diagonally
1 salam leaf
1 piece laos [a.k.a. galangal. I used the two small pieces that didn't work in the salad.]
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons tamarind, dissolved in 1 Tablespoon water
1 Tablespoon sweet soy sauce

1. Cut tofu into 1/4-inch thick slices in whatever size in the other two dimensions as you'd like. [The original recipe says 3/4-inch square, but I left mine in slabs a couple inches across and I liked the result.] Heat the oil until not quite smoking, add tofu and fry in batches for five to seven minutes until they are golden brown on the outside. Do not let them cook through or they'll become leathery. If you do it right, they'll crisp up once they're out of the oil.

2. In small bowl mix sugar, salt, strained tamarind liquid and sweet soy sauce.

Remove all but 1 Tablespoon oil. Turn heat to medium. Fry garlic, onion, chiles, salam and laos until the onions and garlic brown. Add tofu and sauce mixture. Turn the tofu pieces to ensure they're all coated with the sauce and fry for five to eight minutes more until all the liquid has evaporated (except the oil which will still be liquid. Don't be fooled!). Serve with rice or on toothpicks with cocktails before dinner.


The salad is not as good as I hoped. I used a natural peanut butter that was pretty dense and had to water down the sauce to get it thin enough to dress the vegetables. That was fine, but then the salt in the dressing made the vegetables express their own liquid and soon we're talking about peanut soup. Actually, recontextualized like that, (and with the seasoning punched back up) it's not bad. It's a little sweet, a little spicy, a little tart, and the peanut does go well with the cucumber and sprouts. On the other hand, I don't like how limp the vegetables got while waiting for me to finish cooking the tofu. Leave the dressing thick and serve immediately and it's worth doing.

The tofu is deeply savory from the browned vegetables and reduced soy sauce plus a little sweet and a little sour. The salam and laos are subtle but distinctively aromatic. It's got a surprisingly meaty chew and a little crispness around the edges. I don't think I can explain it better than that; it's rather odd and since its primary flavor is umami, there's not a lot of appropriate English vocabulary. Pretty tasty though.

Migas con huevos, Chinese-style

I was digging around the back of my freezer looking for a quick lunch when I came across the remnants of a pack of frozen scallion pancakes I don't remember buying.
You know scallion pancakes; they're a mainstay of good dim sum and Chinese appetizers from lousy hole-in-the-wall Chinese places. As dim sum, they're usually light, flaky and utterly lacking in character or interest. Get them at a hole-in-the-wall and they're heavy, greasy and sit like a lump in your stomach--just the thing for absorbing alcohol at 3 in the morning. Out of the freezer, they're closer to the latter version, but add an egg and meat of some sort and they're a passable meal. Unfortunately, the last of mine had been smashed into pieces.

I've posted about Spanish-style migas a couple times here, but there's also Mexican-style that instead of using bread crumbs as the base starch uses torn-up corn tortillas. This could work.

I'll be cooking this in my flat-bottomed wok (which is pretty similar to a traditional migas pan), so it's going to be a quick process and I've got to get everything I'm adding prepped before I start. Chopped onion and green pepper work in both Mexican and Chinese cuisine. I can spare a handful of beansprouts (the rest are going into an Indonesian salad I'll post about later), and some bay scallops and shredded pork should work as proteins. And finally, a couple eggs. Spanish-style migas drops a fried egg on top, but Mexican-style mixes everything into scrambled eggs. That seems more appropriate.

The cooking went pretty quickly. The first thing was to heat up oil in the flat-bottomed wok and fry the scallion pancake pieces up crisp. Once they were nearly done, I added the onion and pepper and let them soften before adding the bean sprouts, scallops and pork. Once the scallops were cooked (no more than a minute), I added a drizzle of soy sauce and two beaten eggs. I stirred constantly until the eggs were just set and then everything leaves the pan. In the bowl, the dish is finished off with chili oil and a squeeze of lemon to brighten things up. And there it is:


It's a bit unsightly I'll admit. It would look better with more eggs. My egg to bread ratio is low for Mexican-style and high for Spanish-style migas. I would have gone with more, but this is already a hearty serving and the scallion pancake is likely go flabby in leftovers. Right now, though, the crisp-chewy pancake and differently-crisp bean sprouts with the still firm onion and pepper and the soft eggs and pork gives a lot of textural interest to each forkful. As for flavor, each component adds its own character, but the eggs pull the disparate elements together. The scallion pancake in particular adds a lot that rice wouldn't. This is really a lot better than it has any business being. It's a nice hearty brunch; I'm glad I tried it.

It seems to me that Mexican and Chinese are two cuisines particularly well suited for the bowl full of mixed bread and eggs plus flavorings dish concept. You could make an American breakfast version with French toast, maybe. Can you guys think of any other versions that might work?

Marshmallow chocolate malt ice cream

My original plan here was to make a toasted marshmallow ice cream. I've been hearing a lot of buzz about the flavor recently and it sounded worth trying. But I didn't want to just buy a bag of marshmallow, toast them, and then mix them into vanilla ice cream. That's kind of dull and it wouldn't have a very good texture. The places that make toasted marshmallow ice cream and milkshakes have a special process to create kind of a slurry with that flavor that lets them create a smooth mix. But when I looked around I found that the secret processes they use haven't leaked out yet, at least not to anyplace I could find.

So, plan B was malted marshmallow. Malt flavored ice cream with a marshmallow swirl. For a good while I was planning to make a batch of marshmallow sauce and a batch of malted whipped cream, fold them together and call it done. And if I had two bowls for my mixer so I could keep one chilled for the cream while working on the marshmallow I probably would have gone that way. I've seen a fair number of churn-free ice cream recipes using that sort of method and I'm curious as to what sort of texture you can get. But I haven't got two bowls so instead I decided to make a batch of malted milk ice cream in the churn and then swirl in the marshmallow sauce.

Since I needed an egg white for the marshmallow I decided to go back to the custard style for the ice cream. Since I didn't need to infuse any flavor into the dairy, it was a pretty simple recipe. I mixed 9 Tablespoons of malted milk with four egg yolks, added that to two cups of cream and one cup milk and heated until the mixture reached 170 degrees and coated the back of a spoon.

Once it had cooled a bit, I tasted it and wasn't entirely happy so I added a dash of salt and a half teaspoon of vanilla. It still wasn't quite doing it for me so I whisked in 3/4 of an ounce of Dutch process cocoa. That's a bit low for three cups of dairy, but I wanted the malt to be a stronger flavor than the chocolate. That worked a bit too well, so if you're interested in making something similar, you should cut the malt back to 6 Tablespoons and boost the cocoa to a full ounce. And that still didn't quite do it so I added 1/4 cup of sugar and then the flavors started to pop.

The marshmallow sauce was not so easy. Unfortunately, I had such difficulty that I was unable to take pictures as I went along. As I wrote above, I didn't want to start with a bag of marshmallows or a jar of Fluff, so I used David Lebovitz's recipe which was the only one I could find that started from scratch. He uses:

3/4 cup cold water
1 envelope unflavored powdered gelatin
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup light corn syrup (I ran out and used half agave nectar. Didn't seem to hurt.)
1 large egg white
1 big pinch of salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (which I thought I forgot, but since the result tastes of vanilla, maybe I didn't)

He says to sprinkle the gelatin over 1/2 cup of cold water and set aside, start heating the sugar and corn syrup with the rest of the water and only beginning to whip the egg white in a stand mixer when the sugar mixture has reached 225 degrees.

I've got a pretty standard stand mixer and the whisk attachment barely reached one little egg white at the bottom of the bowl so it had a heck of a time whipping it. Lebovitz expects the sugar to reach 240 degrees (soft ball stage) at the same time as the meringue reaches stiff peaks, but I found that to be way off. My egg had barely started. I turned down the heat, but the sugar got up to 250 degrees (firm ball) and developed a little color, before the meringue got to soft peaks and I decided it was close enough.

The next step was to slowly pour the sugar syrup into the mixing bowl. Mine ended up clumping and splattering all over the place. I scraped down the bowl and turned the splatter into another clump. Eventually I got it all incorporated, but it was a serious struggle.

The final step was to pour the gelatin into the warm pot to melt it down and dissolve any remaining sugar and then pour into into the mixing bowl as well continuing to whip until the mixture cools to room temperature and thickens. Well, at Miami room temperature, it doesn't thicken.


To make matters more complicated, while I was dealing with all this, I was also churning the ice cream. The mix was a little on the thick side so I had some trouble with it freezing up solid along the sides and bottom of the churn, but once the bucket had warmed up a little, that sorted itself and the mixture smoothed out and froze up well if a little on the firm side. I was hopeful that meant it wouldn't melt readily as I mixed it with the warm marshmallow sauce, but I'm afraid it did and they blended together instead of swirling.

I had more marshmallow than I wanted to mix in so I poured the rest over the top before putting the container in the freezer.

Here it is the next day. You can see the marshmallow strata has turned rubbery. Not good at all, so I scraped it out and melted it down. That worked well at first, but after a while it lost its foaminess and devolved into an increasingly thick sauce as it cooled and the gelatin took hold. The sauce, since I let the sugar get 10 degrees too hot, has a caramel note to it that I can't say I mind at all. It also tastes of vanilla which I'm pretty sure I forgot to put in so I'm not sure how that happened, and, at least after it melted down, a good hit of salt. Also good with caramel so not a problem.

The cocoa I added to the malt ice cream tastes more like cocoa than chocolate so the result tastes like it ought to be chalky in texture even though it isn't. Does that make any sense? It's not a conventional chocolate malt flavor is what I'm getting at here. I'm surprised people accepted it as readily as they did, really. The marshmallow sauce that I hoped to swirl into the ice cream blended instead and tempered the strong malt flavor. It's still not all that sweet but I think that works very well with the intense sweetness of the marshmallow sauce.


A spoonful of the ice cream with the sauce is full of interesting contrasts in levels of sweetness, of flavors, in textures and in temperatures. And it's also yummy, so despite the difficulties, at the end, success all around.

Oh, one last thing. Apparently July is ice cream month and there's an Ice Cream Social blog meme thing. I'm supposed to link back to ScottySnacks, SavortheThyme and Tangled Noodle. You can go to any of those three to see what other folks have done for the challenge. There are some interesting ideas there, so it's worth looking around if you're bored with my ice cream creations.

Pork rillettes (more or less)

That's French for pulled pork essentially. I finally got my hands on a pork shoulder recently and had to decide just what to do with it. Well, there's only one thing to do with a pork shoulder--slowly cook it with a little liquid until it falls apart--but there's the question of what spices to use. I decided to make the French version since the seasoning is minimalistic. If I go the brown sugar and chili powder route I'm pretty limited as to what I can do with the resulting two and a half pounds of meat. If I was serving several people that's not a problem, but this is half a dozen meals for me. I figure if I just make the pork taste like pork to start with, I can always simmer it in barbecue sauce later. It's not like cooking it longer is going to do any harm.

Here's my pork shoulder with the skin and fat layer removed. If I was going for a proper rillettes preparation, I would have left the fat on and maybe added more. The distinction from American-style pulled pork that I glossed over way back in the first sentence is that, for rillettes the meat is very finely shredded and mixed with judicious amounts of the gelatinized cooking liquid and congealed pork fat for a flavorful, unctuous basic charcuterie. But I'm not doing that so off it goes. I'm saving it to make chicharones later.

A rub with salt and three minutes browning in olive oil is all the prep the shoulder needed. Once that was done, I added to the pot a couple carrots, half a large onion (both in large chunks), three crushed garlic cloves, two bay leaves, a few stems of thyme, a small handful of peppercorns and a cup of dry white wine. I put the cover on and then it all went into a 300 degree over for four hours. After three hours I added a chunked potato too. I would have liked to do this in a slow cooker which would have kept the kitchen rather cooler, but I can't find one in a reasonable size. The ones I've seen are either made for two cups of spinach dip or enough chicken cacciatore for the entire church social. I'm going to have to mail order a two quart model if I can find one with decent features.

I turned the shoulder over every hour, but I don't think that's actually necessary. I did it more to check on progress since I hadn't done this before. I only saw real progress towards the correct texture after three hours, but it clearly was going to take that fourth hour for the connective tissue to fully fall apart.


And with the connective tissue gone, and the meat cooled, it was easy to pull apart using tongs or bare hands. For the first dinner I had a pile of the pork along with the vegetables from the pot with a bit of Dijon mustard and some cornichons as the traditional French accompaniments. Pretty darn tasty; I particularly like how the pork tastes like pork with just a little support from the wine and herbs around the edges to let it strut its porky stuff. So to speak.


The next night I tried it in a barbecue sauce with cornbread and, since I haven't got any sweet pickles, more cornichons. That's not half bad either.

I've still got well over a pound of this left, despite insesent snacking. Is there anything else to do with it or should I just douse it with sauce and serve it on a roll with some cole slaw?

Banana chocolate bread pudding

Before we get into the recipe here, I want to talk a little about how I came to make it. It's fairly typical for me and I suspect other people go through the same process, but I don't recall ever seeing it written up.

So, my batter bread was a few days old and I still had a quarter of the loaf sitting there starting to get stale. Its flavor was a bit too strong and distinctive for me to want to make bread crumbs and it was too soft and crumbly to slice for french toast.

Bread pudding might work, but savory or sweet? With all the molasses in the bread, it could make an interesting savory bread pudding with pork and barbecue flavors, but I wasn't going to have time to cook a pork shoulder until the weekend and didn't think the bread would last that long. Still a good idea for the other loaf of the batter bread that I've got in the freezer. But for now, sweet.

As the bread as aged, it's started to smell kind of like cocoa--lord knows why--so I think a chocolate bread pudding would be a good choice. I quite like how the dark chocolate worked in the oat bars so I'll use the rest of that if I've got enough. After looking at a few recipes, I don't think I do have enough, but I have got a bar of Lindt dark chocolate that can fill it out. The infused chili oil will actually be a nice touch. Now, if I had more chocolate and not enough bread, this dish would have turned out more interestingly as I would have added some of the corn muffins I have in the freezer. There's a Mexican drink called tejate mixing chocolate, corn masa and spices that I could use as a flavor guide. That would have been pretty cool and I regret that I couldn't go in that direction. Maybe next time.

I've got banana in the freezer that should work well with chocolate and the flavor of the bread so I look around to see if such a thing as banana bread pudding exists. Indeed it does, and banana chocolate bread pudding at that, so I won't have to invent anything new. On one hand, that means its more likely to work out, on the other hand, I don't get to experiment as much unless I deliberately leave myself ignorant of what others have done which I prefer not to do.

When I'm making something that's a known codified dish, I find a bunch of different recipes and examine the similarities and differences. It usually boils down specific choices at various aspects and steps. Here, it's questions like: what ratio of dairy to bread do I use? do I slice or mash the banana? melt the chocolate or leave it in pieces? There are also basic versions and more complex ones that add frills like nuts and spices. There may be different schools of those that pull the dish into various cuisines. Not so much in this case.

Once I've got my options in mind, I sometimes decide what I want to do and write the new recipe out and sometimes I just wing it as I go along. I went with winging it this time and, entirely accidentally, most of the choices I made were the same as Emeril Lagasse's version of the dish. I didn't so much follow the recipe as we were both headed in the same direction.

Ingredients:
1 Tablespoon unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 Tablespoon unsalted butter, cold and cut into small dice
2 large eggs
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 cup half and half [This is a rather low amount of dairy for the amount of bread so feel free to increase but don't decrease the ratio.]
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon [I considered adding nutmeg and/or allspice, but I go to that too-obvious flavor combination to often.]
1 ripe banana, mashed [frozen and defrosted is even better.]
1/4 cup pecan, chopped
2 1/2 cups bread, diced [baguette or brioche is tradional. My batter bread made a substantial difference in flavor and texture. It's not far off from pumpernickel so that would be a fine substitution here.]
3 ounces dark chocolate, chopped

0. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Brush an 8x8" baking dish with the melted butter.

1. In a large bowl whisk eggs with sugar, half and half and vanilla until sugar is dissolved and eggs incorporated. whisk in cinnamon and banana until no banana chunks are in evidence. Stir in pecans, bread and chopped chocolate. Make sure the bread is well coated in the egg mixture and leave a few minutes to overnight for it to soak through. [I just did the few minutes.]

2. Pour pudding mixture into prepared baking dish and bake until just firm and a knife inserted into the center of the pudding comes out just about clean, around 1 hour.

3. Cool pudding in dish until warm. Cut into squares and serve with confectioners' sugar and/or whipped cream and, preferably, a cup of coffee.



I quite like how the flavors of the banana and the bread merged and, for that matter, how the bread, banana and custard physically merged into one solid mass. You can see in the picture that the insides have a texture more like the caramel of the graham cracker gooey bars I made a couple months ago than a standard bread pudding. That only happened because of how soft and crumbly the crumb of this particular loaf was. I don't think a baguette would work nearly the same way.



The pudding had plenty of roasted banana flavor without the chocolate fully distributed so keeping that in chunks was the right choice to give some nice flavor and textural contrasts (the nuts help there too). And, on the textural end of things, the crispy edges were very nice and I wish the top had gotten crisp too. Maybe a minute under the broil would have done it, but I'm afraid I might have burnt the chocolate. Otherwise, I'm pretty happy with the results. I don't think it was as fabulous as my coworkers said it was, but it was pretty good.