Tomato Pudding

There are a few dishes in the Southern culinary canon that puzzle even the most experienced eaters among us. For starters, pineapple casserole with its fruit, Cheddar cheese, and cracker crust. Chocolate mayonnaise cake with sugar and chocolate, but savory mayonnaise. Grape jelly meatballs, which are made with spicy chili sauce, tangy barbecue sauce, and sticky-sweet grape jelly.

Add tomato pudding to that list. With sourdough bread, tomato sauce, fresh thyme, and brown sugar, nothing about this dish should make sense. Yet it does.

Learn what tomato pudding tastes like, how to make it, and why it might soon be a constant at your holiday dinners.

What Is Tomato Pudding?

The best way to describe this dish is to have you think about a bread pudding—sweet, sticky, dense bread pudding with a rich custard sauce and crispy bits of bread. Now, make it savory with tomato sauce, salt, pepper, and thyme—but retain a hint of sweetness from light brown sugar.

Tomato pudding seems like the kind of dish a resourceful Southerner would have dreamed up when their tomato crop was grasping its last breaths at the end of a bountiful season, when the fruits are ripening faster than the cook can create. Other Southern dishes came from such craftiness. Tomato gravy, for example, and stewed tomatoes, too.

On the surface, this does probably doesn't make sense to most people. We get it. Even we were a bit confused, but our Test Kitchen pros said that people kept coming back to scoop up more and more—and soon, it was all gone.

What Is in Tomato Pudding?

We've covered the basics—tomato sauce, savory herbs, bread, and sugar—but here are a few more details.

• Bread: We like sourdough bread for this dish, and not the extra rustic kind either. You don't want lots of holes in the bread; a dense loaf is important here. French bread or a baguette would work, too.
• Butter: For mixing up the tomato sauce that will coat the bread.
• Black pepper and salt: For savory seasoning.
• Tomato sauce: Yes, the canned kind. You'll need two cans.
• Light brown sugar: Don't you dare skip it. This delivers that savory-sweet je ne sais quoi that makes this dish truly unique.
• Cherry tomatoes: Some tomato pudding purists would say to keep all fresh tomatoes away from tomato pudding, but we can't help ourselves. They're beautiful and the bursts of fresh tomato sing with the rest of the dish. Adding them really is up to you.
• Thyme: A bright, woody herb that pairs well with the rest of the dish and enhances that savory-sweet appeal.
  

What Does Tomato Pudding Taste Like?

Tomato pudding has a nice balance of savory and sweet. The canned sauce gives it a hint of tomato soup flavor, and the fresh tomatoes break up the sweetness of the sugar. Texturally, the bread is soft, a bit soggy, but crisps up to a wonderfully dense, chewy texture.

Nailing the texture of the toasted bread is the most critical part of this recipe. It needs to be completely crisp on the outside, or the cooked pudding will just be too soggy. Some sogginess is OK, but crisping the bread well before baking adds a toothsome texture to the pudding.

What To Serve With Tomato Pudding

If you have ever enjoyed a savory sweet potato casserole, it's easy to find love for this sweet-and-savory bread pudding. That is to say, both of these dishes go well with an entire buffet of offerings, especially holiday feasts. Everyone will take a little scoop, if reluctantly, and then find themselves going back for a little bit more because it's just so interesting.

So serve this dish along side holiday favorites like roast turkey, a potato casserole, and roasted green beans. Or make it for a Sunday supper with meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and roasted broccolini.

How To Store Tomato Pudding

Leftover pudding can stay in the casserole dish—unless you only have a little bit left, in which case, you can move it to an airtight storage container. Wrap the dish in plastic wrap. Keep in the fridge 3 to 4 days, and reheat in the microwave.

You can also freeze tomato pudding, but the texture may change slightly. The bread may become more wet and mushy after thawing. Reheat it in the oven to help crisp up the bread again.