Now, don’t get me wrong. I love pumpkin pie. The filling, specifically. It’s so creamy and spicy and sweet and YUM. I am presenting this bread pudding recipe as something to do with any leftover pie filling you might have. Last year I found myself with far more pumpkin custardy goodness than the pie shells I made could handle, so I grabbed some leftover stale French bread, and the rest is history. This entry will be a two-parter: one for the bread, the other for the pudding part. This is the bread entry.
Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day is probably my favourite bread cookbook. I have others, of course, but they all require things like letting the dough rest for three years and feeding it like a small child. And while the idea of home-nursed, sourdough starter, seriously old-school bread has always intrigued me, when push comes to shove and I want bread, I don’t have three years to feed a burbling blob of goo until it reaches flavourful maturity. I want bread now. Ish. So, ABi5 it is.
The ABi5 method is fast, easy, and requires a surprisingly small amount of active bread-making time. Most of it is just waiting, while you go and do other things. Awesome. First, you measure. The flour is measured using their ‘scoop and sweep’ method, not the standard ‘lightly spoon and carefully levelled’ method you probably grew up with. It really is as simple as it sounds: just scoop up a cup full of flour with your measuring cup, and then quickly level it off with a finger. Tada!
Once everything, wet and dry, is in the bowl, stir it together as quickly as you can. You don’t want to handle it too much. You’ll have to use your hands at the end to incorporate everything, so I’d recommend just doing that from the start. After that, cover the dough and let it rise for two to five hours. At that point you can refrigerate it (the maximum amount of time depends on the individual recipe, see their book for more details), or just go from there.
Now, we shape. For Challah, braiding or ‘turbaning’ is traditional, but as far as I’m concerned you can do whatever you want. I braided mine. The ABi5 guys have great photographic instructions on how to do both here. I’m baking mine in a tin, so my braid is pretty ugly, but I don’t really care.
Because I know I’m using this bread for bread pudding, I’m going to let the loaf rise a bit more than I would usually so it will dry out faster and absorb more custard without being too dense. So, after I’ve braided the dough and placed it in a greased & floured tin, I’ll leave it in the oven (that I’ve preheated a teensy bit so it’s just a little warm, and then turned off) for about an hour and twenty minutes. I’ve got some leftover dough, and I’ll bake that tomorrow for Thanksgiving dinner with a normal rise amount.
Once it’s risen, bake in a 350ºF oven until the loaf is golden and sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom. If you used a tin, remove the loaf from the tin. Let the bread cool on a rack before slicing. If you know you’ll be turning the loaf into bread pudding, slice it up and lay it out on wire racks overnight to let it dry out before pudding-ing it.
Challah
By Zoë François & Jeff Hertzberg, M.D.; from their book Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day
7 cups all-purpose, unbleached flour
1 ½ tbsp yeast
1 ½ tbsp salt
½ cup unsalted butter, melted
½ cup honey
4 eggs, lightly beaten
1 ¾ cups warm waterProceed as I described above. Tada! Also, buy their book. It’s really cheap on Amazon.
Stay tuned for part two, where I turn this loaf into a dish of pumpkiny goodness!
