Pumpkin, continued
Pumpkin and Pear Bread Pudding
I love pumpkin. I love pears. I love this recipe. The original is again out of Cold Weather Cooking by Sarah Leah Chase. This book seems to live on the kitchen table at the moment. Possibly something to do with the ice on the windows, and the entertaining noise of someone skiing down the hill in a car.
This is the kind of fabulously labour-intensive recipe that you’ll probably only even dream of trying around the holidays, when you already have too much to do, because humans are a perverse species. It’s like, yes! I still have 1,000,000 presents to wrap, the hall to deck with ivy, forty-three gallons of eggnog to make for the Christmas fete, and the ostrich to comb . . . I know! Let’s make a pudding that takes two days, so I have to have started it yesterday to have it ready for dinner tonight, when we’re entertaining Santa, the mayor, the town crier, and the local rugby team, who did such a grand job filling in as elves and reindeer!
Part One: The Day Before: Pumpkin bread
Note that the original recipe has you making only one loaf of bread. This seems to me foolish. Making bread is making bread so you might as well get two loaves out of all that effort.
Enough yeast for two loaves of bread. I (a) always use less than they tell you to, and (b) do it by the old pour-it-into-your-palm-till-it-looks-right method, so you should probably follow the directions on the packet.
1 c warm water
½ c slightly salted butter, melted and cooled
2 c pumpkin puree, which is about what you’ll get out of a standard jar/tin, which is another reason to make two loaves. I’ll be telling you to roast your own pumpkin for the custard, but even I will admit that fresh pumpkin is a bit wasted in bread. If you’re making this insane recipe at all, you’re probably pretty fond of pumpkin, so you’ll be able to find uses for the rest of that fresh roasted pumpkin* after you’ve abstracted 2 c for the custard
¼ c honey
2 large eggs
@ 10 c flour: I use approximately 5 c white spelt, 4 ½ c wholemeal spelt, and ½ c barley flour. I usually stir in 4 c white and 4 c wholemeal and the barley, and then top up by handfuls as the dough comes together.
The day, or even two or three days before you want to serve this ridiculous pudding, put the yeast in the warm water with a little of the honey, stir, and let ‘prove’, which is to say wait until it produces bubbles of fuzzy froth on the surface. I do this in a measuring jug, because you want the water warm, and a big mixing bowl takes too much warming up. While you’re waiting for the yeast, put the pumpkin, the butter, the rest of the honey and the eggs in your hugest mixing bowl, and beat them together well. Then add the yeast mixture and stir it in, gently and kindly, because yeast is alive and appreciates thoughtful handling.
Now start mixing in the flour. I always let a ‘sponge’ sit for twelve hours or so, but this is a personal thing; I will point out that for those of us who do eat flour but probably shouldn’t, a nice long sponge makes the final product easier to digest. If you want to do this, you want to use a third to a little under half the flour for the sponge–I use 3 c wholemeal and the barley, and about ½ c white. Mix it in, cover the bowl, put it somewhere relatively warm–in this weather I put spongeing bread on a very tall trivet over the Aga–and leave it.
Whenever you’re ready to be getting on, mix in the rest of the flour. As soon as the Thing in the Bowl even remotely begins to resemble dough I start flouring my left hand and kneading with one hand while I’m still stirring and scraping with the other. If you’re used to making ordinary bread, this will be a little stickier than you’re used to, and the eggs and all that butter make it fluffier and crumblier. I knead in the bowl, which saves washing the counter, but I continue to add handfuls of flour till it sticks to itself more than to me. You want a nice silky stretchy soft homogenous lump by the end. How long it takes depends on how strenuously you knead.
If you’ve done it on the counter like a good girl (or boy) you can clean the bowl out and oil it lightly and put the dough back in it. If you’re a lazy slut like me, just leave it in the bowl where it’s been all along. In forty-plus years of making bread I have never had bread fail for having been kneaded and left in a dirty bowl. Cover it again though so it doesn’t get too much of a crust over the top. Although chances are you’ll come back to a tent, so be sure whatever you cover it with is washable, and you can lightly grease the top surface, although I don’t usually bother (see: lazy slut). Don’t use cling film: you want the dough to rise, not be trapped in the bowl, beating feebly at its plastic ceiling and crying, Help, help, let me out. Leave it somewhere reasonably warm and reasonably draught-free. People get religious about rising bread dough. It’s not necessary.
Let rise till approximately double, about an hour; maybe more, depending on your climate and your original sponge and your quality of kneading.
Punch it down and let it rest while you butter the bread pans. USE BUTTER. Butter is a FAR better stickproofer than anything else out there. Some things cannot be improved on. Butter is one of them. Knead your dough a few more times and then pull it in half. Lightly flour your counter and then pat each half out in a rectangle approximately the width of the length of your bread pan: and then roll it up snugly to make a bread-pan-sized loaf. Put two loaves in two pans. Let rise about half an hour: it shouldn’t quite double this time, but it should round up out of the pans nicely. While you’re waiting, preheat the oven to 400°F.
This is also an excellent time to cut your small sweet pumpkin in half, scoop out the seeds, lightly oil** the cut sides, put them face down in a shallow baking pan, stab them carelessly a few times, and prepare to put them in the oven with the bread.
Bake about 35 minutes, turn the oven down to 350, then gently turn the loaves out of the pans and put back in the oven for another 15-25 minutes. The crust should be brownish and crusty, and any of you who make bread know the famous and famously misleading business about rapping on the bottom for a hollow sound: if it sounds hollow, it’s done. Well, maybe. But because of all the pumpkin, eggs, and butter in this, it will sound differently hollow. Feh.
Let cool thoroughly. You’ll need about three-quarters of one loaf for the pudding; when it’s completely cool–it won’t slice properly if it’s warm, and you’ll squash it and make a mess–hack off the quarter loaf and then slice the rest, and if you have room, lay the slices out somewhere overnight to get stale. I usually just stand them roughly upright in a bowl because I do not have room.
Part Two: Either the Day Before or The Day: Pears
2 c sweet apple cider: this is an American recipe, so I assume she means non-alcoholic. English semi-dry, which is to say faintly sweet, hard cider, is terrific in this recipe, but if I’m using it I omit the Amaretto and may use Calvados, or maybe just a little more cider. On the other hand, you can also get hard perry over here, which is gorgeous and divine and another reason for living in England, in which case I use Poire William, when I happen to have had enough foresight to lay some in. But this recipe is such a nightmare you have to kind of train for it, so I usually do have it: also a bottle of Poire William (or Calvados) will sit quietly and unobtrusively in the back of a cupboard for years, being pulled out and dusted off occasionally for less arduous cakes and things.
2 T Amaretto (or whatever)
½ c dark brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp allspice
6 biggish, relatively firm pears, peeled, cored, and sliced
Put everything but the pears in a saucepan big enough to hold the pears too. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Let simmer 5-10 minutes. Add the pears and cook gently–you may want to turn the heat down a little–about 10 minutes. Remove pears (with slotted spoon) and set aside. Simmer–don’t boil–the liquid till it’s reduced to a thin syrup. Put the pears back in the pan and coat them well all over. Set aside, but if you’re doing this on the day, keep warm if you can. You want the pears to go on sucking up the syrup without getting so cooked they turn to mush. If you think of it, do the pears the day before when you make the bread, and just put the pan with the syrupy pears in a corner somewhere and let time do the job.
Butter a 15 x 10″ baking dish*** and preheat the oven to 350°F. Half-chop and half-tear your nine slices of semi-stale pumpkin bread into 9 c of big crumbs, and put in the pan.
Part Three: Definitely on the Day: Pumpkin Custard
Now the custard, or, Why I Will Probably Never Make This Pudding Again or at Least Not Until I Brace Myself to Experiment with Milkless Custardy Things
2 ½ c milk
¾ c heavy cream
6 large eggs
2 c pumpkin puree, and you want it fresh. It really makes a difference. So I hope you baked your pumpkin like I told you to.
¾ c granulated sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp allspice
3 T Amaretto, Poire William, Drambuie, or Calvados, depending on what appeals to you and what’s in the back of your liquor cabinet
Scald milk and cream together over medium heat. Remove and let cool a little. In a bowl big enough to hold everything, whisk the rest of the ingredients bar the liqueur together. Then whisk in the scalded milk and cream, and the liqueur last. Pour the custard evenly over the crumbs in the baking dish.
Set the dish in yet a larger dish and add enough (hot) water to come 1 inch up the side of the inner dish. Bake about 40 minutes. Spoon the pears and syrup over the top and bake till the custard is set, about 20-25 minutes longer.
Serve warm. (You can serve it at room temperature, but warm is better. Do not serve straight out of the refrigerator. You don’t want it to have sat around long enough to go in the refrigerator anyway: things get soggy and separate and become other things in the refrigerator. It’ll still be good the next day but by the third day I imagine it would be getting pretty sad, if it ever lasted that long. ) There’s this whole extra recipe for Caramelized Amaretto Cream to go with it, but I start losing the will to live about then, and have never made it. I recommend good old fashioned whipped cream or pouring cream myself.
* * *
* And I can give you suggestions.
** In this case, use oil. Butter will not stick to raw wet pumpkin.
*** Effing cookbook writers and their millions of variously sized pans, which they have the cupboardry^ to house. A few lines down she/I am going to tell you to put this vast object in yet a larger pan. Every time I make this–partly because I don’t make it very often–I get to this point and say ARRRRRGH. I make it in two 8″ square pans because that’s what I’ve got, and on the rack below them–and as close to them as possible–in the oven I put my 13 x 9″ pan and keep it full of water. This works. It’s not elegant, and it goes in a footnote because it’s so obviously a Heath Robinson apparatus, and for all I know the texture of my pudding is all wrong, but I wouldn’t know, would I?, because I’ve never made it the right way. Anyone wants to try doing it both ways and reporting back, feel free. Meanwhile my deviant pudding is excellent, if I do say so myself.
^ To coin a word that needs coining
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