In an effort to satisfy my husband's cravings for his Grandmother's long-lost chocolate bread pudding recipe, I have been working on narrowing it down by trial and error. I'm close...really close. But when you have no actual recipe, and are trying to guesstimate with approximates, its not that easy. For starters, this bread pudding is made with biscuits. I am even having trouble with THAT part of the equation. It turns out that homemade biscuits are not all that easy. The recipe itself seems to be fairly simple, but the actual handling of the dough makes all the difference as to how light and fluffy the biscuits come out. Again, Bruce is comparing what comes out of MY oven to what he remembers Grandma making umpteen years ago, with NO recipe or instructions, so....Trial and Error. I have the taste part down to almost there, but the light and fluffy part....not so much. My best result so far has been the recipe off of the White Lily flour bag. White Lily was the ONLY flour that his Grandmother would use, so it stands to reason that maybe that was her recipe???? But mine are not coming out light enough, so I need to play around with that. My first correction is to add more baking powder. And then I am going to have to resort to the one thing that I have an aversion to....Lard. Grandma used lard in her biscuits. That much we both remember. But I have never used lard for anything. It just seems so wrong and unhealthy. My grocery store doesn't even carry lard. We looked. And the other store we ran into to check had it, but it was in this huge bucket that I would never be able to use it in my lifetime. And apparently lard has a very finite shelf life....so....? I'm sticking to my baking powder idea first, and will resort to hunting down a reasonable sized container of lard only IF I really have to.
But anyway, my latest bread pudding attempt is in the oven right this minute. I think I have that recipe figured out for the most part. If I could only get those biscuits right, maybe the texture of the pudding would be right as well. I don't know, but I do know that this pudding is made with those "not as light as I wanted" White Lily biscuits sans lard, so its extremely "iffy". Not that my other attempts have been bad. Actually, it turned out to be extremely tasty. Just not exactly like Grandma's. But we ate it. And if this process turns out to be a lengthy one, we may both end up being about 300 lbs as we gobble up the test runs....
2 comments:
Lard does make a difference. I like the biscuits better with them.
Make sure you cut the lard (or crisco works well) into the flour well. The flour will resemble corn meal if you cut it in enough. This will make sure that all the flour gets the fat which gives the taste to the biscuits.
Also try not to work too much flour into the biscuits as you turn them out. You don't want the flour to be sticky but use the least amount possible
I have also found that letting the biscuit dough set there after you cut it and place it on the pan for a couple of minutes helps the dough rise
Hope this helps
Jeanne
don't ask how i knew about lard ;) haha.
i just googled lard and this came up:
"Lard: The New Health Food?" haha
much love!
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