This Mushroom Bread Pudding recipe is a real showstopper. Perfect for those holidays parties where you need to wow your in-laws and feed a crowd, it’s a great accompaniment to everything from roast beef tenderloin to rack of lamb. It can even act as a main course for vegetarian holiday meals–not vegan though; this dish has plenty of cream and cheese!
What You Will Need:
- cutting board
- measuring cup
- knife
- 13 x 9 x 2 inch baking pan
- 1 lb. loaf of crusty bread
- 2 tbsp. olive oil
- 4 tsp. chopped thyme
- 2 garlic cloves
- 6 tbsp. unsalted butter
- 1 lb. assorted mushrooms (like Crimini, Portobello, or Button)
- 1 white onion, diced
- 2 leeks, cleaned and finely diced
- 1/3 cup chopped fresh parsley (plus a tablespoon or two more for garnish)
- 1/3 cup chopped fresh basil
- 1 cup half & half
- 2 ½ cups heavy whipping cream
- 8 large eggs
- 2 tsp. salt
- 1 tsp. black pepper
- 1/3 cup Parmesan cheese, shredded
- 1/3 cup Fontina cheese, shredded
Steps:
We preheated the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, collected our ingredients.
First, we started in our bread (this is a bread pudding, after all!). As professionals, we felt obligated to chop our bread properly with a knife and a cutting board, but to tell you the truth, using your hands to break the bread into bite-size chunks would work just as well.
We tossed our bread chunks with fresh thyme, garlic, salt, black pepper, and olive oil. Then, we threw them onto a foil-lined baking sheet and into the oven to crisp and brown for twenty minutes.
While waiting for the bread to toast, we got going on our leeks. The main thing to remember when cooking with leeks is that they can be very, very, VERY gritty. The sandy soil they grow in gets stuck in between the layers, so be sure to wash them thoroughly. We like to split our leeks down the middle and rinse them under cold water so that we can make sure every layer gets good and clean. You can also slice your leeks before washing and let them soak in a bowl for ten minutes before draining. Both methods work pretty well.
We chopped up our leeks as well as a medium-sized white onion and threw them into a frying pan with six (yikes!) whole tablespoons of melted butter. Yes, it’s fatty, but the smell of onions, leeks, and butter is divine. We cooked our onion and leeks for about ten minutes or until the onion was translucent.
Meanwhile, we shredded our Parmesan and Fontina cheese.
And pulled our bread out of the oven. See how brown and delicious it looks! Then, we turned the oven temperature down to 350 degrees Fahrenheit so that it would be ready for the bread pudding.
Then, we started chopping our mushrooms. Here, we use baby portabellas and wild chicken of the woods mushroom but any mushrooms will do. We’ve used shitake, oyster, large cap portabellas, and even plain old button mushrooms–all are delicious. We also chopped up our parsley and basil.
The mushrooms go into the pan with the onions and leeks to soften and cook.
Then, we mixed the mushroom and leek mixture in with our toasted bread cubes.
Next, we cracked eight eggs and mixed them in with 2 and 1/2 cups of heavy cream, 1 cup of half and half, 2 teaspoons of salt, and a teaspoon of black pepper. Then, we mixed in our herbs and tried to let their green freshness help us forget about how much dairy fat we were about to ingest.
We poured our cream and egg mixture into the bowl with our bread cubes, mushrooms, and leeks and gave the whole thing a good toss.
Then, we spooned our bread pudding mixture into a greased 13 x 9 x 2 inch baking dish, topped it with our shredded cheeses, and popped it into the oven to cook.
Though the recipe says to bake the pudding for an hour, checking it at 45 and 50 minutes is probably a good idea. We pulled ours out at 50 minutes so it wouldn’t get too dry, but every oven is different!
We let the bread pudding rest for about ten minutes, which was all the time we could stand before we had to dive in. Garnished with a little fresh chopped parsley, you couldn’t ask for a more delicious holiday side dish.
