Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bread Pudding and Pumpkin Beer Tasting

Oh, hello there! It is early fall, which means it is time to….

And we did. Oh, we pumpkin’d ALL the things. The things we pumpkin’d were, specifically – bread pudding, rice crispy treats, pumpkin seeds, and beer.

Quick note on the rice crispy treats before getting to the good stuff. This came about because I found pumpkin spice marshmallows at the grocery store and thought to myself, “this could either be really delicious or really horrible.” I decided to take my chances, and was pleasantly surprised with the subtle pumpkin flavor of the marshmallows. Microwaved and mixed up with butter and cocoa krisps, and you have a fun little treat that takes only a minute to prepare and tastes great!

What do you think? Gross or delicious?

My real focus of the night was making pumpkin chocolate chip bread pudding. There are a number of good recipes out there, and I typically jump to AllRecipes.com for inspiration. Much of the credit goes to this recipe from AllRecipes user JJCUNEO, which I used as the base and added some tweaks to make it my own.

Here is what I used, and if you don’t care about the recipe, skip to the bottom to read about BEER!

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bread Pudding

Ingredients
Bread Pudding
3 eggs
9 egg yolks
4-1/2 cups whole milk
1-1/2 cups sugar
2-1/4 cups canned pumpkin puree
1-1/2 tablespoons vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
~11 cups challah (or white bread) cubes
1 bag (12 oz) miniature chocolate chips
3/4 cup packed brown sugar

Caramel Sauce (optional)
1 cup sugar
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream

Directions
Bread Pudding
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease 9×13 pan.
2. Whisk together the egg and egg yolks in a large bowl. Add the milk, sugar, pumpkin puree, vanilla extract, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg; whisk into a smooth batter. Add the challah cubes and toss gently to dampen. Set aside for 15 minutes.
3. Pour the batter into the pan. Sprinkle chocolate chips and brown sugar over evenly.
4. Bake in preheated oven until pudding is golden brown and puffy, about 50 minutes; transfer to cooling rack for 10 minutes.

Optional Caramel Sauce
Place the sugar in the bottom of a deep saucepan and heat over medium heat. As the sugar melts, start whisking. Once it comes to a boil, stop stirring. As soon as all of the sugar is a light amber color, carefully add the butter and whisk until melted.
Remove the pan from the heat. Carefully and slowly add the cream then once it settles down, whisk to incorporate. Let cool in the pan for a few minutes then transfer to a heat-proof container. Cool to room temperature before storing in the refrigerator for up to two weeks. Serve warm on top of bread pudding.

Add some whipped cream on top and enjoy!

Beer Review

All the beer, ready to drink!

One of the many reasons I love Sean is that he introduced me to Total Wine and More, which is pretty much the greatest place on this planet aside from, obviously, Wegmans. Total Wine has a huge selection of beer, but the best part is that you can create custom 6-packs from almost anything you want in their vast beer aisles.

We knew we wanted to have a ton of pumpkin beer to drink for this event, but really didn’t plan any further than that. While looking around Total Wine for pumpkin beer, Sean and I both turned to each other and said at the same time, “Let’s do a pumpkin beer tasting!” Off we went to collect a nice selection of beer. In the end, there were many more options available, the selection we picked included the following (sort of in order in the picture from left to right):

1. Woodchuck Pumpkin Cider (just added for the ew factor) – 6.90% ABV
2. Sam Adams Harvest Pumpkin Ale – 5.70% ABV
3. Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale – 5.84% ABV
4. Magic Hat Wilhelm Scream Pumpkin Ale – 5.40% ABV
5. Shipyard Smashed Pumpkin – 9.00% ABV
6. Southern Tier Brewing Company Pumking – 8.60% ABV
7. Weyerbacher Brewing Company Imperial Pumpkin Ale – 8.00% ABV
8. Dogfish Head Punkin Ale – 7.00% ABV
9. AleWerks Brewing Co. Pumpkin Ale – 8.00% ABV

I won’t go into too much detail about each beer, but I think we found a good range of tastes. The cider was absolutely disgusting, and there were mixed opinions on the Sam Adams, Shipyard, and the Weyerbacher. I think people largely enjoy the Dogfish Head and Magic Hat, since those are pretty familiar to the group.

I would say that there were definitely two clear favorites. Sean’s pick, the AleWerks Pumpkin Ale, has a high ABV but goes down smooth, with a strong pumpkin aroma and had one of the most pleasant pumpkin tastes out of the selection of beer. There is a light hops flavor and hints of cinnamon and nutmeg, and overall got a positive response from the group.

However, I think we all agreed that the clear winner was our friend Brett’s submission to the bunch, the Southern Tier Imperial Pumking. The beer smells strongly of pumpkin and has an orange-ish amber hue. The taste has a solid pumpkin & spice flavor, significant but at the same time completely pleasant and almost sweet, with a hint of caramel. At almost 9% ABV, this was amazingly still one of the smoothest beers out of the group we tasted. Pumking is truly a treat in a bottle, perfect for a chilly fall evening.