vanilla bread pudding with stone fruit

I used to be a little snot (used to be, you say?). One day during the course of my stage at Oleana, I told the pastry chef, Maura, that I wasn't a fan of bread pudding. I hadn't yet learned that you don't tell this to cooks; that claiming not to like something ends with you being prodded or strong-armed into trying their adaptation of it. Sometimes, when we say "don't like," what we mean is don't understand or aren't impressed by or, as my french chef used to say, "it is not very interesting."

I worked at the time at a bistro in Boston that served chocolate bread pudding with whipped cream (side note: it really irks me when people call it chantilly on menus...it's whipped cream people). We made four hotel pans of the stuff, using leftover house bread (baked by me & my boss) plus the supplementary bread we got on the weekends. The night guys usually cut the bread for us, two large fishtubs, but occasionally we'd have to top it off, then make the custard. I'd be up to my elbows in the stuff, tossing the bread, letting it soak. Then I'd have to portion it into the four hotel pans, bake them in barely-there hot water baths consisting of the 1/2-1 inch of water I could pour on the full sheet pan and, when baked, pull these same suckers out of the oven without spalashing hot water all over myself and burning the mitts. So I was usually pretty clumsy and usually made a mess (big surprise, right?). Suffice to say I'd had it with bread pudding and I felt that I was pretty well informed on the topic.

Well it only took a couple bites of Maura's bread pudding to change my mind. Hers was made with homemade brioche, pretty standard, and I had excellent results baking it with Acme pain de mie as well. Maura soaked her bread in a mixture of custard plus simple syrup; her theory was that the simple syrup prevented the bread from getting too heavy and resulted in a lighter final product. I'm not sure whether that's true but I know the results are certainly delicious.

This version below features stone fruits, with cherries just coming into season! We don't have peaches yet but we do have apricots, which are delicious baked or roasted. As promised a long time ago, here is the bread pudding recipe adapted from Maura's supremely wonderful brown butter bread pudding with mulberries and milk jam at Oleana.

vanilla bread pudding with stone fruit:
{makes 1 lg. deep dish pan (9x13) +/- a few extra ramekins}


custard base:
eggs 9
sugar 2.5c
cream 4c
milk 2.5c
vanilla bean 2, split and seeded

for soaking:
simple syrup: 1c
cubed bread: 8c
custard base above

fruit, to add:
pitted cherries: 2c
peeled, sliced peaches: 2c

Warm dairy with vanilla beans and infuse 30 minutes. Whisk eggs and sugar together. Add cream and milk. Place bread in large bowl, coat with simple syrup and then with custard base. Let soak 1 hr or until most of liquid is absorbed, tossing bread every so often. Add cut fruit to soaked bread and mix. Pour into baking pan, using ramekins for any overflow. Cover with foil and bake at 325 for 35 minutes. Remove foil and bake 15 more minutes or until top is lightly browned. Center should be set. If not, keep baking.*

*I worked somewhere where we baked bread pudding FOR THREE HOURS once.

in other notes:
*huge burn blister on my finger with goo bubble the diameter of a caper. it needs to go away.
*valrhona cocoa powder, how i have missed you.
*i should do a post on ways to infuse vanilla beans, maybe i will.
*i ate the second half of my burrito for dinner and now i have nothing to look forward to at work tomorrow.
*claudia fleming is still awesome.
*i've been reading a book a day, about.
*my car is not dead and gone forever. hell yeah! road trip seattle anyone?
*i'm contemplating a series of podcast essays. main problem: i'm not interested in the sound of my own voice, unless i'm pretending to be claudia gonson. second main problem: that just sounds gimmicky and slightly pretentious.
*i need to learn to say no, sometimes, and stop doing everyone a favor all the time.
*i chopped orange peel for a long time today and it was really theraputic and zenlike. i recommend it.

&you are?; an ingredient list

shamelessly stolen from chef, though I did him the courtesy of letting him know.

butter is from litlnemo


a list of ingredients, techniques, methods that are meaningful to me:

black peppercorns
pink peppercorns
apples {esp. northern spy, stayman winesap, pink pearl}
butter
sugar {white, brown, demerara, muscovado}
cream
milk
eggs
middleton gardens fraises des bois + mara des bois + raspberries
lemon verbena
nectarines
plums {italian + french prune plums, mirabelle, and the small plums i used to sell here}
vanilla bean
coffee
doughnuts
chicory
malt powder
whiskey
lavender
new england blueberries
caramel
custards
ice cream
mulberries
zaatar
citrus {meyer, eureka, yuzu, bergamot, kumquat, tangerine, grapefruit}
apricots
rosewater and orange blossom
salted almond
walnut + black walnut
honey
phyllo
mastic
sb 70%
valrhona equtoriale + jivara lactee
rosemary
jam
semolina/polenta/cornmeal
brown sugar
butter cake
roasted banana
huckleberry
black tea {lapsang souchong, darjeeling, earl grey}
korean mint
molasses
gingerbread
coconut
passionfruit
root vegetables {parsnips, baby beets}
arugula
eggplant
marshmallows
brown butter
cardamom
cherries
quince.

chez panisse, the update

Monday night dinner at Chez Panisse downstairs.

We started off with almonds and olives. As usual, my mother suggested I try olives. On my last SF vacation, I tried olives at least twice, and grimaced each time. Since then, I've tried other olives--and had tried them again twice this weekend--but these were olives I found myself unable to stop eating. They were slightly warm, slicked with oil and salt, and tasted like good olive oil had solidified and grown strangely shaped pits. We ate our way through the helping of olives and then we ate more. They brought bread (Acme, of course). First course was a warm onion tart with a little salad of microgreens and egg, pancetta for my mother's but not on mine, mild flavors but very fresh. I think you'd like the pancetta, she said.

I don't eat bacon. But I've been thinking about it, I replied. I remember enjoying bacon, especially dipped in maple syrup. It's been on my mind, lately, bacon, and it's one of the only meat products I actually have a taste memory of. Probably because I keep accidentally eating it.

The second course was chicken with morels and hand-cut pappardelle with peas and spinach. I'd like to hope they make their own pasta, rather than cut the pappardelle from strips as Sonsie used to do. Being Chez Panisse, I'm sure this is the case (although I was surprised to lean my lovely olives were sourced from Provence via NYC, rather than locally). They look like little brains,I said, and my mother warned me. I proceeded to eat every scrap on my plate, from the perfectly moist chicken (perfect chicken #3, and again something that inspired me to make perfect chicken, though of course I wouldn't know where to start). What I liked about the morels was that they lacked that slippery mushroom texture that gets gummy in my mouth. And then I began thinking of getting some ramps, peas or fiddleheads and morels from the mushroom store at the FB, and learning to cook.

Finally, (and thank heavens it wasn't plain fruit with dessert) bing cherries in syrup with toasted almond ice cream. An unsightly, not-great S shaped cookie garnished the dessert. But everything else was perfect. Down to the half bottle of A. Rafanelli Zin we shared in homage to last August's trip to Healdsburg (and SF, before it became my new home).

ice cream and a good book

I churned the Lemon Verbena ice cream tonight. There's something impish and wonderful about cleaning out the bowl and then licking the more-frozen bits that stick to the side off a wooden spoon. Ice cream is my weakness, what can I say? Today I suggested to the roommates that I get an ice cream cart and go peddling in the hood.

Tomorros is the cherry festival at Frog Hollow! We're giving out samples of cherry granita, and I think Farmer Al will be there. Not too sure what else is happening, but I'll be there at 11 in my cherry-red Sox t-shirt.

I'm reading Amanda Hesser's book right now, "Cooking for Mr. Latte." I wasn't initially interested; the watercolor on the front made it seem too chick-lit. But I like Hesser's articles, when I remember to read them. And the Oakland Library really doesn't have much interesting in the name of food writing. Also Reading Fran Gage's "A Sweet Quartet."

Trying to pare down the menu for Frog Hollow Saturdays. I think I'm going to keep it simple this week and do projects that don't involve much finish work, then on Saturday try to slip in a bread pudding (might be a challenge, though; it'd have to be baking by 11. We'll see...)

I can feel the weather changing but let's enjoy spring

cherry pitting time
Originally uploaded by the_jade_greene.

All of a sudden there are cherries everywhere. Last week brought the first flush of Al's cherries to market, and this week, as I was lazily thinking of ways to fix my polenta cake and wondering if I really wanted to do anything with cherries other than eat them raw, the cherries just started piling up. This morning, a 6 qt. pan slowly molding. By the end of the day, thirteen pounds more. I made a small batch of Cheffy's clafoutis base and used up scant handfuls making cherry financiers.

I have always though it funny when those big-shot savory chefs (like Tom Colicchio, in "think like a chef," among scores of others) discuss eating and cooking seasonally. Inevitably they mention the anticipation and excitement of spring's first blush(oh, ramps are coming! we've got the first snap peas!), which means something quite different on the east coast than in California no matter how locally you're sourcing your food. Maybe it was jealousy, or maybe just the pastry chef's suspicion of the ego of the rest of the kitchen world (so often it's their haughtiness that reconciles us to the background, and it's the rare chef who appreciates adequately her patissier). This Frog Hollow gig has always been intriguing because the one stated goal of the job was to use the fruit, and so I would be forced to rely on what the market brings in each week. With citrus and rhubarb there hasn't been much, but now we're talking maybe peaches next week and I'm already feeling the pressure of cherry season, the excitement of something new so tasty and the real urge to present it at its best.

My boss, Becky, came by today. She watched me scoop financiers and wash strawberries. According to my supervisor she was also going to work with me for a while, but this didn't happen. She seems content to let me do whatever, but I know she knows this fruit, as a baker, better than I ever will, and she used to work at Oliveto. She's got skills. When she tells me how to cook down the cherries in syrup to preserve them, I can sense the knowledge differential and I'd like to see sometime what she would teach me if she got into the kitchen.

This Thursday is the Cherry Festival! Free cherry granita at Frog Hollow and who knows what-all else. I really do love the Ferry Building.


Last night I had pasta with fiddleheads and garlic in a white wine butter reduction. It was good. Fiddleheads remind me of cold, almost wintry upstate New York weather, the day Jes and I went driving and got the maple syrup. I tried to epxlain fiddleheads to my french friend but apparently there's no translation. So I found pictures, which only left her completely flummoxed as to why I would eat plant buds, but not bacon.


Pigs are salty, I said, in reply. What I mean by that is that bacon is salty, but I have no memory of what pork as meat tastes like. I ate tuna tonight, for the first time. Shocking, I am.