Friday, October 15, 2010

Too Late for Summer Pudding

Yes, late...  again...  but summer pudding is a wonderful English thing, reminds me of my mum, and was the most fun to make of the many things I haven't posted for you yet.  Perhaps you could make a variation with Fall fruit?  Maybe plums, blackberries, blueberries?


It's just cooked fruit, in a bread casing. I served it with cream, but custard is traditional. Whatever you do, the fruit combination needs to be tart, and dark purple-red. Personally I'd always avoid strawberries, too sweet and soggy. And ideally there'd be redcurrants and blackcurrants. Redcurrants we managed to find, blackcurrants were elusive - do you even have them in the US?  (Other ingredients here were blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries.)


Anyway, I made it for July 4th. Everyone brought fabulous desserts, as it turned out (and I'd made a backup chocolate thing too, in case the summer pudding went horribly wrong; will post that another time, promise). But even though it might be regarded as a little weird, with the bread and all, people seemed to like it.

The Recipe: Summer Pudding
From the BBC's h2g2, i.e. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Of course.

Thoughts/Tips/Mistakes
Choice of bread is key - this is one thing where you don't want your fancy artisanal stuff. Something with a close texture, firm enough to hold the pudding together, but that will also melt nicely into the fruit. I did use store-bought white, but a fairly decent one. It was almost OK but, as they said, cheap store-bought white bread turns into an "unpleasantly slimy mush," and mine was a teeny bit closer to slimy than it should have been. Though frankly I'm not sure what else I could have used.

Here it is in the bowl:


The other thing I could have handled better was the juice. I was a bit afraid that the bread wouldn't hold up, so held back on the juice.


Looks pretty, but I should have "primed" it a bit more. Likewise, they tell you to pour two-thirds of the juice into the pudding at the end, but I held back. Again, you can see the result - it should all have been red:


It all came out fine in the end though - I just poured the remaining juice over before serving, and it soaked in fine.  No pictures of the whole turning out of bowl thing, it was a little stressful.


Knew there was some reason why I kept those weights!  Used baked beans for the full English effect.

4 comments:

kayematheny said...

Having enjoyed this on the 4th of July, I can attest to how delicious and fresh (and pretty) this was. Yummmm!

Yesica N. Cook said...

Kaye, you are so cute! Thanks!

Anonymous said...

fresh and tasty indeed...and nice photos too! -- jam

Catherine said...

This looks so beautiful and delicious! Summer pudding is indeed a wonderful thing that can be enjoyed anytime!
Cheers~