Reduced-Fat Bread Pudding

With a simple recipe like bread pudding, the opportunities to slim it down are few and far between. At 800 calories per serving, something needed to be done, but we didn’t want to sacrifice flavor and texture. Here’s what we discovered:

Test Kitchen Discoveries

• Instead of a ton of egg yolks, we used just a few whole eggs. Replacing some of the yolks with whites provided structure for the pudding and significantly reduced the calorie count.
• Replacing the heavy cream with skim milk made for a healthier pudding, but did nothing to help thicken the custard. A few tablespoons of instant pudding mix solved that problem and added only a few extra calories.
• Reduced-calorie bread dissolved into the custard and turned the pudding to mush. We found that cinnamon swirl sandwich bread was sturdy enough to stay firm in the pudding and it also added a nice boost of flavor.
• Traditional recipes have 780 calories, 48 grams of fat, and 29 grams of saturated fat per serving. Our changes brought the numbers down to 300 calories, 7 grams of fat, and 1.5 grams of saturated fat.