Dark Chocolate Bread Pudding

I’ve sung the praises of bread pudding several times in this blog – its goodness, simplicity, and adaptability. As a frequent bread baker, I often have a few-days-old loaf available for a pudding, and fresh fruit for a filling – apples, peaches, pears, bananas. For a change this time, I tried a variant new to me: chocolate.

I couldn’t find a recipe I liked in any of my cookbooks, but the ever-obliging Google offered many choices. I picked the one from the King Arthur Baking Company website, both because King Arthur is a resource I trust and because its recipe was the only one that specified dark chocolate. Yum!

I love making bread pudding because it’s so easy. The ingredients do require a bit of preparation, but the only tools you need are a knife, a spoon, and a whisk.

Here are the ingredients for one-third of the recipe. Clockwise from the bread cubes, there’s milk, eggs, unsweetened cocoa powder, chopped chocolate from an extra-dark Venchi bar, granulated sugar, and vanilla extract.
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The first thing to do was butter my smallest soufflé pan, dump in the bread and mix it with half the chopped chocolate.
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Next, in a small pot I put half the milk, the rest of the chocolate, the cocoa and the sugar, and stirred it over low heat until the chocolate melted and the cocoa and sugar dissolved.
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Then the liquid chocolate had to be poured into a larger bowl and have the rest of the milk, the eggs, vanilla, and a pinch of salt whisked in, creating a custard base.
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I poured that over the bread and chocolate in the soufflé pan, stirred it about, and left the dish on the kitchen counter for half an hour, so the bread could absorb the liquid.

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My pudding baked in a 325-degree oven for an hour, until the custard part of it had firmed. (When testing for doneness with a skewer, I had to avoid the little patches of semi-melted chocolate chunks.) Then it needed to rest for a while to fully set – which was fine, because that cooled it just enough to be ready to eat at the end of our dinner.
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It was a great dessert – not heavy but rich; not sugary-sweet but deeply, intensely chocolaty. The bread had practically turned into chocolate cake, lightly cloaked in velvety custard. The recipe suggested serving the pudding with whipped cream, ice cream, or confectioners’ sugar, but we were perfectly happy with it just as it was.
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