The Swap That Makes Homemade Bread Pudding So Much Easier

Bread pudding is a rich, decadent dessert that's surprisingly easy to make — it's just bread and custard baked together. This simple combo punches above its cooking difficulty class. It's a wonderful, moist dessert, especially when you use our solution for preventing a dry bread pudding. There is one part of the dessert that can be tricky though: the custard. 

When you make fresh custard you have to make sure you don't cook it at too high a heat or it will curdle. If you cook it for too long it will also curdle — too short and it won't set. Also, don't forget to stir constantly so the heat is evenly applied! Making custard incorrectly is even the No. 1 error on our list of mistakes people make with bread pudding. It feels like cheating, but there's nothing wrong with avoiding all of this headache and making bread pudding even simpler by replacing the homemade custard 1 to 1 with melted ice cream and an egg whisked in.

This trick works because ice cream is essentially frozen crème anglaise: it's cream, eggs, sugar, and a flavor already mixed together. You'll simply add another egg to make the bread pudding fully set and not be a soggy mess on the plate. As long as the ice cream is high quality you'll never know the difference. Cheaper ice creams use stabilizers to both aid in transit (prevent it from melting and refreezing) and hold more air bubbles (use less costly cream and more free air). These cause them to take longer to melt and result in a smaller amount of cream that's more viscous than you may want. There are many ways to melt the ice cream: stovetop over low heat, a microwave on low power in short bursts, or just move it to the fridge.

Alright, what flavor should you get? There's nothing wrong with the obvious choice: a simple brioche bread pudding with a vanilla ice cream custard. However, once you open the door to using melted ice cream you're presented with a grocery store aisle full of flavors to play around with. Just leave out chunky mix-ins as they won't work well here. 

An excellent choice is salted caramel ice cream. The richness of the salted caramel enhances the caramelization of the bread — and chocolate ice cream is a great way to amp up chocolate bread pudding. You can even get a little non-traditional with pistachio and matcha, or seasonal with pumpkin. Honestly, with this trick making the whole process so easy, there's no excuse to play around with ice cream flavors!