Hot Air Balloon

Hi y'all, I'm Paula Deen and it's up, up and away today in my beautiful big balloon

with a picnic basket chocked full of nibbles for the ride. So first I'm going to show you my son Jamie's own recipe for the best chicken salad sandwich in the whole wide world

and not to be outdone by Brother Bobby's pimento cheese bread. I'll share a simple, old-fashioned bread pudding recipe for chocolate lovers high and low

Then I'll show you a French bread sandwich stuffed to the crust, and tips galore are coming your way

So let's get picnic packing, because we've got to fly. In my opinion, there's nothing better than fresh bread

It's right up there along with the finest desserts. I love big, steamy, hot, fresh buns

You can't beat it. And today's show is all about bread and things that you can do with it

You can make sandwiches, you can use it as a snack, or it even makes a fabulous dessert

And before I can get started today, I'm going to find the best bread that's around

And to find that great bread, I've got to find a great baker

So that's what I'm in search of today. And I know just the place to find great bread

My friend Daniel at Bread Alone has every kind you can think of

Hey Daniel. Hey Paula, how are you? I'm fine, how are you doing? Good to see you

Nice to see you too. I'm so excited about a show I've got coming up

I'm going up in a hot air balloon and every item that I'm preparing today contains one of my favorite foods

And that's bread. Well you came to the right place. I'm telling you, I wanted to come straight to the expert

And what are you making? My son Jamie's chicken salad. Going to have sandwiches

I'm making my son Bobby's pimento cheese bread. I'm making chocolate bread pudding

And lastly, I'm making stuffed French bread. So I really want that bread to be exceptionally good

So what do you recommend? Well, we've got some great breads right here. This is our peasant bread

It's reminiscent of country breads of France and Italy. Again, it's a very, very simple bread

Well, it looks yummy. Yeah. And this is a semolina bread. This is made from durum wheat flour covered with sesame seeds

Very, very golden crumb. I love sesame seeds. Yeah, this is great

And this is a bread actually from Altamura in southern Italy. All of our breads have been influenced by either Germany, France, or Italy

I travel a lot and visit bakeries all over Europe. Well, I feel so lucky to be able to be with you today

And this is a 100% whole wheat bread that's filled with sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, and flax seeds

That looks delicious, too. Make sandwiches out of this? This is wonderful for sandwiches

So you're going to fix me up now. Here you go. Okay

If you have an opportunity today, look up in the sky, and you'll see me and your bread flying in a beautiful hot air balloon

Sounds good. I appreciate it so much. Bye-bye. Bye. I didn't leave any bread for y'all

One of the best things that you can put on good fresh bread

probably is a nice homemade chicken salad. And that's what we're going to start with today

My son Jamie's homemade chicken salad. Now, I've already cooked my chicken until it was tender

and pull the meat off the bone. You know my son Jamie came up with this recipe

when he and his little brother Bobby used to help me in the kitchen

Now we're just going to coarsely chop him. I don't like my chicken salad chopped real fine

Some people will even put it through a food processor, but I want to know that I'm biting into big, fat, plump, juicy pieces of chicken

not some kind of spread. So we're just going very lightly chopping

And I love warm chicken salad. By the time I get him mixed up, he's still going to be warm

We're just going to take some diced celery. Simple is always so good to me

We're going to add our boiled eggs. Be sure when you're boiling your eggs to put plenty of salt in the water

It'll help the egg slip right out of the skin. Now I added some lemon pepper And now I doing a seasoning salt and this is called Jane Crazy Mixed Up Salt And then I going to add the mayonnaise And I can tell you how

important this one step is right here. Don't skimp on your mayonnaise. Don't buy a store

brand or a cheap mayonnaise. It's very, very important that you start with a good quality

rich mayonnaise. So we're just going to toss this together. Jamie's not real fond of onions

Now that's where we differ. I love them. And I have found that I can put a dehydrated dry

onion in my chicken salad. And for the onion haters, they almost never, never even realize

it's there because you don't bite into the pieces of them. So at this point I would slip

in some onions, son, and you would never know it. Now, all I'm going to do at this point

is throw some pepper in it, and I love fresh ground pepper. I don't know if it's, I like

playing with a pepper meal or if I just really like it. All right, now I'm going to come

over here for the very last thing that we do to this bowl of chicken salad is I'm going

to take just a little of this stock, and you can see the richness. I'm going to just pour

a little bit of that over there just in case. Insurance, you know what I mean? Just a little

insurance. All right, now we're just going to mix this up. You won't believe how creamy

that makes your chicken salad, especially after you refrigerate it. I'm starving for

a chicken salad sandwich, so I think that's what I'm going to make with this. And I'm

going to use this great brown loaf of bread right here. Doesn't that look beautiful

I'm going to start by first cutting the end off. That'll make great croutons or even toast

Let's see, do I want it little or do I want it big? How about in between

And you really have to make sure you've got a good serrated knife when you're cutting bread

Otherwise, it's going to make your bread collapse. And you want it to stay nice and perfect in its shape

All this now is personal preference, but on the sandwich that I'm going to fix for myself

I'm going to put some purple onion and tomato. That way I feel like I'm at least getting a supply of my vegetables

Instead of lettuce, I'm going to throw in a fresh spinach, which I don't have to tell you how good spinach is for you

It's looking good already, isn't it? I'm going to top it with just a little salt and a little more pepper

And now that looks so good. And this is the way. Oh, he's coming out the back over here, y'all

That and a potato chip doesn't get any better. It'll be just perfect for my balloon ride later on

Believe it or not, bread for dessert. Chocolate bread pudding coming up next

Can y'all imagine anything better than chocolate and bread? Personally, I don't think I can

That just sends me over the top. You know, earlier I was talking about breads are right up there with desserts as far as I'm concerned

Well, we're fixing to have the best of both worlds. We're fixing to have bread and dessert

This recipe is called chocolate bread pudding, and I'm beginning by just cubing up some bread that's a couple of days old

It's not real fresh. Great way to use up bread. If you've got bread that's going stale, just throw it in a plastic bag and throw it in your freezer

and save it for the day that you are hungry for some good old hot bread pudding

Now, some of your bread pudding recipes will actually call for staling your bread

In other words, cutting it like this and leaving it on the counter overnight to dry

But I found that a real quick way to stale bread is to just cube it up, put it on a cookie sheet

throw it into a slow oven about 200 degrees, and let it just dry out in the oven just for a few minutes

and you've got stale bread. All right, now in this bowl, we're going to put just a white granulated sugar

and brown sugar and cocoa, and we're just going to kind of toss those up together just like that

We're just going to kind of grind up that brown sugar because, you know, it's kind of on the lumpy side

And in this bowl, I've got six eggs that have been cracked

I'm gonna add some ground cinnamon, some vanilla extract about a teaspoon And then one of the extracts that I love so much it smells so good and I found that the flavor of it just goes with so many things like this is wonderful with peaches

and it's an almond extract. And I'm going to put two teaspoons of the almond into my eggs

and I'm just going to whisk that up. You know, I think bread pudding is probably started out years

ago is probably a poor man's dessert, like rice pudding started. All right, so we've got bowl one, bowl two, and now we're going to bowl three

And into the third bowl, we're going to add our milk, a little heavy cream, and about

a half a cup of Kahlua. Another one of my favorite aromas

We're gonna add grated semi-sweet chocolate. I'm just gonna whisk that up

And now all of the bowls that we've assembled are gonna go together

I think I'm gonna add my milk to my dry ingredients because to me it just seems to mix up easier

if you put wet into dry. I'm gonna put enough just to blend it

and get all those ingredients wet, just like that. Now it's safe to go ahead and add all of my cream and Kahlua

And then I'm going to add my beaten eggs that has those delicious aromatic flavors

And we're just going to kind of whisk them together. All right, we've got all those mixed together

And all we're going to do now is pour this over our bread

You can see our bread rising up. And I'm going to take my whisk and kind of just press my bread down in there

until it soaks up all that fresh milk and eggs and chocolate

You can see the bread going from white to brown. Now, if you want to at this point, if you've got something else that you can be doing

you can just walk away from it, leave it on the counter for 10 or 15 minutes

and let it finish soaking up. But I have helped this along, so I think he's ready for the oven

This is soaked up nicely for us, so we're going to slip it into a 325-degree oven

and bake it for about an hour until it's nice and set

But I can't wait for y'all to wait that long, so I have another one ready

I've just got to show you the finished product. Doesn't it look delicious

Chocolate and bread. Mmm. I'm going to see if this is set good enough for me to just cut me out a little square

Personally, I like my bread pudding hot like I like my bread, like I like my men

I really do like this hot, but it's also good warm or cold as far as that goes

But I just love hot bread. A little cocoa for garnish, a dollop of fresh whipped cream

And because I want to be really decadent, I'm going to do me just a few chocolate curls

Just in case I hadn't had my chocolate fix for the day. Mmm

It's so delicious. Up next, my son Bobby's pimento cheese spread. And we're going to stuff that French loaf

I hear the crew getting the balloon ready right now, so y'all stay with me

Now, for my youngest son's Bobby

60-second pimento cheese. We've got a sharp yellow cheese. We've got a little jack cheese

We've got fresh grated onion. Remember, there's a difference between grated and chopped

You can see all the onion juice coming in. So that's really going to give it a nice kick

We've got diced pimentas, a three-ounce block of cream cheese, and we're going to kind of break them up

A little seasoning. Not much because pimenta is real salty, so remember not to over-salt your pimenta cheese

And that good brand of mayonnaise again. We've got Pamela cheese spread, y'all

Just that simple. Bobby, I did you proud today, son. It's delicious

Not as good as yours, but pretty close. And now for my stuffed loaf

This recipe is so simple and easy. It's almost pure silly. We're going to start with two 8-ounce packages of cream cheese

And these are nice and soft We got one dry package of Italian dressing fresh chopped parsley fresh chopped red bell pepper

and a little ingredient that I don't use very often, but when you need him, he's the only thing that'll do

And that's dried beef. And you buy him in a jar in the meat section at your grocery store

I just love him. He gives a powerful kick to any dish

So I'm just going to kind of fork all those things together just to give me a little head start

And now I'm going to add some mayonnaise. Isn't this dish pretty

It looks like Christmas kind of, doesn't it? This is so, so simple

As I said earlier, it makes a great snack. Sometimes when Michael and I go for a boat ride

I'll fix some of these and just throw them in a bag and toss them on the boat. They're good on the fishing trips

If we're running down to Charleston, I'll throw some in the car for us to snack on

And sometimes I'll even fix some and just take to work with me to munch on

when I'm working upstairs in the office and not down in the kitchen. The whole meal that we prepared today

travels very, very well. See how simple that was? You could even put this in a basket and fly away

We're ready to stuff our bread. At this point, now, it's up to you to decide the kind of bread that you want

Personally, I like the French bread. But when I was at the bakery, I found this bread that I just fell in love with

and I've got to try it, so that's what we're going to do. I love a crusty, tough bread

Oh, I just love the sound that it makes. And I'm going to pull just a little bit out

so we'll have some place to tuck our filling in. The beauty of this dish is I would make it the night before

It's great for a trip on the boat or a trip in the car, a lunch box, or a snack at the office

So just mix this up quickly before you go to bed. Stuff it into your loaf just like this

And don't be partial. Both sides now. Breads and cream cheese make a heavenly snack

They just go together. In fact, if you wanted to, to really kick it up a little bit and give it even more flavor

is we could have put a stick of softened butter in there and made it really, really sinful

So you can see how simple and easy that is. Now, at this point, before I went to bed

I would just take this and wrap it in some saran wrap, nice and tight, and let it chill overnight

And that cream cheese is going to get back to the consistency it was when you bought it from the grocery store

on the firm side. But you know I can't wait that long

Y'all all know me. I'm going to dig into it right now

So there you go. You can make this stuffed French bread with any kind of variety that you like

And coming up next, I'm going to take this show to heights it's never been before

Before I fly today, let me tell you just a couple of quick things that you can do with

old bread. They make wonderful bread crumbs for casseroles or coating your crab cakes

in. There's many, many things that you can do with them. All you have to do is break

it up, put it into your food processor, and grind it until it's very fine crumbs. Store

it in a plastic bag or a plastic container in your pantry or freezer until you're ready

to use them. Another great way to use up old bread is making croutons. They make out of

this world over the top croutons. If you've got a loaf of bread that's going stale on

you, all you have to do is wrap him up good, put him in the freezer, and when you're ready

to use him, pull him out, let him thaw, and put him in a slow oven and let him heat back

up and he's almost good as new. I've had so much fun today playing with all the breads and the

fun ain't over yet because I'm packing a basket full of Jamie's chicken salad sandwiches

Bobby's pimento cheese spread, my chocolate bread pudding and my beautiful stuffed

loaf. Well I gotta fly now y'all and I mean literally fly

I hope your bread rises as well as my balloon

Until next time America, best dishes from my kitchen are yours