I made biscuits the other day. It sounded like a good idea but I ended up hating them.
B-o-r-i-n-g. Even a generous pat of Kerrygold butter couldn’t bring them to life.
OK. I’ll admit that it may have been me. I am in my third week of recovery from back surgery. I’m cranky.
So, when I couldn’t bring myself to love the biscuits, I decided to repurpose them. When life gives you lemons…
I decided those boring biscuits just might become a tasty bread pudding.
My history with bread pudding is kind of spotty. Bread pudding was never in my family’s cooking repertoire, so it came as a wonderful surprise to me when I first enjoyed it at a safari lodge buffet in Kenya’s Masai Mara years ago. (Actually, I made two food discoveries at that lodge–bread pudding and the British breakfast cereal Weetabix. If you are unfamiliar with Weetabix, give it a try. It’s wonderful and you can buy it at Trader Joe’s. Weetabix and cold cold milk is my midnight go-to on nights when I can’t sleep. )
After that bread pudding epiphany in Kenya, a world of other variations on the bread pudding theme opened up for me. There was the wonderful Om Ali served at the Mena House Hotel in the shadow of the Giza pyramids. In New Orleans, there is bread pudding served in a generous puddle of whisky sauce at Brennan’s. In India, there was Shahi Turka, a bread pudding made with bread, ghee, sugar, saffron, rosewater and almonds. Properly made, Shahi Turka can be extraordinary– as it was at the Taj Hotel in New Delhi lo those many years ago. I’ve been chasing that recipe for a very long time.
Clearly, creative chefs and stale bread can soar anywhere in the world. Who knew?
Here is a recipe for New Orleans-Style Bread Pudding With Whiskey Sauce.
[mpprecipe-recipe:172]
This recipe was adapted from one that appears on The Spruce Eats site. Here is a link: Bread Pudding.
