Deep fried bread and butter pudding with rhubarb and cold custard

Searching for home

Living in Singapore has really stripped bare the small things that I held dear to me as a restaurant chef, namely the ability to pass the months by the bounty or sometimes lack there of beautiful seasonal fruit and vegetables. I’ve always been taught to follow the seasons, cook what grows closest you and the mantra of ‘what grows together goes together’. This ethos becomes quite complicated when cooking in a country that imports 90% of its food. As a means of reclaiming that structure I suppose I spend more time voyeuristically watching what chefs in London or New York manage to conjure from the farmers market; in fact I’m often hunting through Natoora just to stay aligned with when I can get my hands on blood oranges or in this case Forced Rhubarb. It’s my way of staying connected with my home and also a compromise I can align with… keep in the season with Europe and use as much organic or slowly produced vegetables as I can afford from Malaysia. Bringing me to using Rhubarb this past month.

Early on in my career I worked at a restaurant with a chef so obsessed with rhubarb that he purchased rhubarb triangle t-shirts for him and the head chef. It was a source of great pride to him and great anxiety to me and the other chefs when he would come into to make the rhubarb frangipane tart on a busy Saturday lunch service; invariably sending us down. There was even one week where I attempted his geometric tart pattern, it was at that point that I realised i’m not really one for the finesse of a pastry kitchen. Whilst it’s unlikely you’ll ever see me doing this sort of tart, I am interested to introduce Singaporeans to flavour profiles that might seem classic to me but are alien to them.

Whilst a lot of my dishes draw on a pretty global palette at this point, i’m oddly classic when it comes to dessert combinations. I think I might have swallowed the Phil Howard blue pill about never truly enjoying any dessert that doesn’t hit those classic flavour notes.

The classic combination of Rhubarb, custard and vanilla is an age old combination but one that I’ve packaged into a deep fried bread and butter pudding with a sharp rhubarb compote. The play of hot, sweet, sour and cooling custard is quite a dance on the palette but actually is a level of comfort that I didn’t know I was searching for. My colleague on three separate occasions mentioned that this dessert was gaining cult status, something unbeknownst to me, but we do seem to have more people coming in just for dessert and there’s that tik tok influencer vibe that seems to go straight over my head.

I can’t claim to have invented the idea of a bread and butter pudding or even to deep fry it, that must go to Cafe Cecelia but as with all dishes I work on, my ADHD brain has to start from fresh and cook by hand and by eye until I like the flavour and then reverse engineer to the recipe so I shall take credit for this dish nevertheless.

Deep fried bread and butter pudding with rhubarb and cold custard

Ingredients:

For the Bread and butter pudding

1 litre cold custard recipe

12 all butter brioche rolls

100g rum/ bourbon soaked raisins

For the cold custard:

750ml milk

750ml cream

Vanilla bean paste to taste

180g sugar

270g egg yolk

Salt to taste

For the quick rhubarb compote

300g forced yorkshire rhubarb

45g sugar

To serve:

Cold custard

Sugar for dusting

Method:

Start by making the cold custard recipe, you need this as the base of the bread and butter pudding but also to drizzle all over the finished dessert.

In a pan bring the milk and cream to a boil, adding the vanilla bean paste to dissolve and infuse. In a separate bowl whisk together the sugar and egg yoks until combined and once the milk and cream is hot, pour over the yolks mixture,whisking to temper the eggs. Pour back into the pan and stir over low heat until the mixture thickens. If you have a digital thermometer you are looking for the temperature to hit 82c. Once ready, pour through a sieve into a bowl and place said bowl over an ice bath (bowl with water and ice) to cool it down. I like to season the custard with a pinch or two of salt to level up the flavour and as tasting I might add more vanilla bean paste, I want the flavour to be punchy and luxurious.

Making the bread and butter pudding

Soak your golden raisins in rum to cover and let sit while you’re making your custard.

Firstly, line a baking tin or loaf tin with baking parchment then start to tear up your butter bread rolls into medium chunks. Dip these into your cold custard and place into the tin compacting it all tight together. You’ll make two layers with the rum soaked raisins spread on top of each layer. Pour in the rest of the custard and squish it all in. Wrap the tin with tin foil and bake at 170c for 40 mins, uncovering at that point and baking a further 5 mins until it’s all set. Pop a skewer in to check if it comes out clean, there’s a bit of carry over time in cooking so I think 45 minutes is an appropriate time.

Let cool and place in fridge for at least 3 hours or ideally overnight, turn upside down onto a chopping board and portion into 12 pieces.

Rhubarb compote

Very thinly slice the rhubarb and cover with the sugar. It’s a ratio of 15% sugar to the weight of rhubarb, let it sit and macerate for as long as you feel, it can be really soft or quite crunchy depending on your taste. In the restaurant I vacuum seal the rhubarb with the sugar which infuses even further and gives it that pink hue very quickly.

Now for the difficult but super worth it restaurant chef part. Get a heavy duty pot of neutral fryer oil on the heat until its 180c, fry your portions of bread and butter pudding then take out and leave to drain briefly, roll them around in a bowl of caster sugar, pour your custard on to the plate and top with the bread and butter pudding and a spoonful of rhubarb compote.

A wee little playlist to get you through your prep