RECIPE #2: Chef Hatzis' Warm White Chocolate Bread Pudding

I tried to care about the Super Bowl this year. Really, I did. See, fútbol americano hasn't thrilled me since I was ten years old, when the original Chicago Bears Shufflin' Crew took down nearly everything in their path. I wasn't into sports then, either, but that mythical 1985 team was a damn cultural phenomenon. In Chicagoland, Bears Fever was unavoidable, and I remember actually feeling invested. I even tried to watch football games that year, although I would usually space out once I'd reached my limit of time outs, replays, turnovers and constant commercial breaks featuring a bunch of shit I wasn't interested in (cars, beer, financial services).

Today, I am comfortable enough with my masculinity to admit trying to watch football bores the living crap out of me. Sorry, boys, too much planning and strategizing and reviewing. I don't follow soccer or hockey, either, but at least those dudes keep moving. The only sports less engaging to watch than football are the ones where players stand around picking their asses for even longer, such as golf or baseball. At least football has violence, but even that's pretty weak compared to big sports in other nations.

The Bears returned to the Super Bowl this year, only this time, I had seen about twelve seconds of their season. I didn't even know what Rex Grossman, their star quarterback, looked like until I was staring at the Big Game. (Sadly, he doesn't resemble the old Brawny paper towel man, which is the mental image his name gives me). I've also given up on caring about the expensive Super Bowl commercials - commercials in general, really. I don't know, I guess I'm weird in that I don't find any pleasure in being baited into paying attention to a product. The big story this year was that a lot of companies took their cue from YouTube and aired "user-generated" commercials, meaning people made amateur ads and advertisers picked the ones that best suited the image they wanted to project. This signals the dawn of a new age, or at least a new model of psychological manipulation. Forget that trend of ads featuring people who work at the manufacturing plant (the implicit message: "sure, we're a huge corporation, but we're really just regular people like you"), or featuring people who had a favorable experience with the product ("here is one of our actual customers, who is a regular person like you"). Now, the public is so overwhelmingly complicit that consumers actually compete to create the very same ads that are being used to market to them. What an exciting time to be alive!

So, needless to say, the broadcast itself wasn't a draw for me, although I did watch parts of it. The only reason I didn't spend the day at the movies is that my friends always have a party which doubles as a potluck food fest. This was the twelfth straight year for this traveling bash. I've only missed one (sorry, I was hanging out with a pretty girl), but I must admit that my culinary contributions have been lazy the last few times I attended. Last year, for instance, I just brought a bunch of chocolate peanut butter balls that my grandma had made and were left over from Xmas. They were delicious, but through no effort of my own. Most everyone else at least opens a packet or stirs something. This year, I resolved to reverse that, and because I am trying to learn to cook some things, the Super Bowl party was a perfect opportunity to try out a recipe I'd been contemplating.

Through work, I'm on the mailing list of the Hotel Baker, a swanky old joint in St. Charles, Illinois. One of their newsletters included Chef Jamie Hatzis' concoction for bread pudding, which is something I never ate growing up but have enjoyed on the rare occasion I've tried it. Considering the amount of heavy cream it contains, I wasn't about to make a whole pan of the shit for myself. If I wanted to do myself in, a noose would be cheaper and quicker. I needed an occasion, one where people love to eat decadent food. An occasion like the Super Bowl party. Here is the complete story.

I began by filling an 8x13" baking pan with cubed bread. This is not an exact measurement, depending on the depth of your pan and the kind of bread you use. Chef Hatzis recommends brioche for a richer texture, regular white bread to make it lighter. I was gonna go rich, but I couldn't find any brioche at the damn Dominick's, and they had a sale on store brand white bread. It took nearly an entire large loaf to fill my pan (donated by mom, bless her). On top of this, you dump 4 oz. each of melted white chocolate and sliced bananas. For the white chocolate, I substituted the vanilla-flavored "make your own almond bark" stuff, only because I imagined it would be easier to melt in the microwave. I didn't measure the bananas, I just sliced enough to make a decently-spaced layer over the bread - about three small ones in total.

The next step is the sauce. For this, you need a whopping 1 1/2 quarts of heavy cream, into which you dissolve 12 oz. of sugar over low heat. That's pretty easy, you just stir it until you can't feel any grit. The recipe didn't specify this, but I took the cream/sugar mixture off the burner and let it cool a bit before continuing. The next direction needed contemplation: "Slowly add beaten eggs and whisk together with seasonings." Okay, the ingredient list calls for seven eggs, but the seasonings (vanilla, nutmeg and cinnaMON) just say "to taste." So, you're supposed to taste it and add raw eggs at the same time? Fuck that. I spiced the cream first. By the time I finished this, it kind of tasted like eggnog, and I was confident the cream was cool enough to not instantly cook the eggs as I slowly whisked them into the pot. All you need to do from here is pour your mixture over the bread, which I did in several passes, allowing the gunk to soak in and make room for more. The baking pan was full to the brim by the end. This went into the oven for 45 minutes at 375 degrees, and I had a big old pan of bread pudding.

Holy crap, was it tasty. If you have never eaten bread pudding, imagine custard with chunks of sweet doughy stuff in it. It's pretty easy to make - the hardest part is cutting up all the bread, and that's not very hard, just time-consuming. You won't notice if you put on some music while you're doing it (this batch was created to the strains of Therion's surprisingly proggy new record, Gothic Kabbalah). The only stitch in the process was that there wasn't any room in the pan for the pudding to expand, so I ended up needing to clean the oven due to some spillage. Next time, I might want to use a deeper baking pan, but make sure to use the same amount of bread.

What I like most about this recipe is that it's very adaptable. I'm not sure what difference real white chocolate would have made, but I will find out for batch number two. I'm also not sure I would use bananas again, as they didn't add much to the flavor or texture. Traditional recipes often call for raisins, but I can imagine apples, berries, mangos or chopped nuts working as well. Honey, mascarpone, toffee, granola... you could add all sorts of stuff to the basic mix. (I'm making it again this weekend, and I'm going with pear slices.) Give it a try, your friends will be impressed.