Beard House Highlight: Bananas Foster Pot-de-Crème with Toasted White Chocolate Bread Pudding

Beard House Highlight: Bananas Foster Pot-de-Crème with Toasted White Chocolate Bread Pudding / French-Creole, Modern and Classic

With a culinary reputation as established as New Orleans’s French-Creole cuisine, the successful reimagining of any classic dish is a tall order. Thankfully, Nathan Richard and Neal Swidler were more than up to the task during their Beard House dinner, turning out course after course filled with familiar components creatively transformed into elevated yet satisfying modern fare. For the final course, Swidler presented this play on the Big Easy mainstay bananas foster, trading the table-side flambé for a more refined riff on the traditional French pot-de-crème. The delicate custard conjured comforting memories of banana pudding, contrasting with the gooey top layer of foster sauce, just boozy enough to take your tastebuds from childhood nostalgia to drinking age. Paired with a few rough cubes of bread pudding, toasted for a crunchy exterior yet yielding middle, this dessert was a showstopper, even without the flammable finale.

Add a bit of Big Easy brash to your next holiday party with this decadent make-ahead dessert. Get the recipe.

View all upcoming Beard House event menus and book your seat at jamesbeard.org/events.

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Maggie Borden is assistant editor at the James Beard Foundation. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.