I have issues with pudding. I find the texture in your typical pudding cup to be extremely off-putting, no doubt related to an unfortunate childhood incident with yogurt that ruined a lot of creamy substances for me. Despite my hatred of pudding cups, I do still fine the powdered pudding you combine with milk to be palatable. The difference is in the consistency – the pudding mix renders a firmer, heartier product, while the pudding cups are just soft, glutinous goop. I recently bought a small cookbook filled with miniature versions of desserts that I find irresistibly cute, but the problem is that several of the tasty-looking desserts require using pudding, whether as a layer over cake or as a base topped with fruit. Remembering that the box pudding was tolerable, I thought that homemade pudding must be even better. But when was the last time you had pudding make from scratch? Isn’t it just one of those things that’s born in a box or a cup?
The Joy proffered a simple enough recipe for vanilla pudding. A few pages later I found the recipe for several types of coulis, which is nothing more than a seedless, pureed, fresh fruit sauce. With a bag of frozen blackberries languishing in my freezer, I knew I had an easy substitute for the raspberry version of the recipe. The bag of blackberries, 3 tablespoons of sugar, and 2 teaspoons of lemon juice went into the blender for a spin. I pushed the resulting puree through a sieve and threw away the seedy remainder, leaving me with a smooth, gorgeously dark red liquid that was a nice balance of both sweet and tart.
The pudding inspired a little more trepidation in me when I saw that I would have to do something I had never done before: temper an egg. There have been a few times while making pancakes that I have failed to let the melted butter sufficiently cooling before throwing it into the rest of the batter, leaving me with a lumpy mass because the eggs have started to scramble. I would have to go easy here if I didn’t want to end up with scrambled egg pudding.
Into a pot went the sugar, the cornstarch, and a bit of salt. I whisked in a small amount of milk to make into a smooth paste, similar making a roux. Followed by more milk, the mixture was heated to a simmer while being whisked constantly. Next came the egg. I beat 1 egg in a small bowl and added a small amount of the thickened mixture, stirring it thoroughly, then poured that mixture back into the pot. The glorious, pale yellow, French vanilla-like color was an unexpected sight. The mixture was cooked for another full minute before a small amount of vanilla extract was added. Following the general pudding instructions to not let the mixture cool, I immediately poured this into martini glasses and covered them with plastic wrap before putting them in the refrigerator. The few licks of the hot mixture I took from the spatula were full of vanilla flavor and custard-like in texture – it was satisfyingly thick, not like pudding cups at all. I couldn’t wait to taste the cooled, finished product.
In the end, pairing the coulis with the pudding wasn’t the best idea. Together, the blackberries overwhelmed the vanilla and I couldn’t taste much of the pudding at all. But, on their own, they were simple and fantastic, tasting heavily of their individual ingredients. The blackberry sauce may have been too much with the pudding, but I can easily imagine it spooned over a thick piece of pound cake. The pudding proved to be quite easy to prepare, despite my anxiety over the egg, and it tasted purely of vanilla goodness. It certainly wasn’t much more difficult than stirring milk into a boxed powder. Why we don’t make it anymore is a mystery to me.
Ingredient Comparison
I’ve always been interested in cooking, but something that has recently aroused my drive is the desire to cut back on the amount of processed foods I consume. I’ll be the first to admit that I highly enjoy frozen pizza (and not the healthy organic kind but the kind that you can pick up for $3 on sale) and I totally use bottled pasta sauce and find canned broth the paramount of convenience, so this isn’t a holier-than-thou proclamation. It’s simply the knowledge that I can’t control the ingredients in foods I don’t prepare myself, but I can in the foods I do. As I watch people in my family suffer from certain diet-influenced diseases, this is something over which I increasingly want to maintain my command. So, when able, I’ll post side-by-side lists of the ingredients I used in my recipes and the ingredients in the typical store-bought item for a comparison of what I’m truly consuming.
Here I compared my pudding to the boxed mix that I would actually buy (as opposed to the pudding cups), so you would also need to add whatever milk you normally use. I haven’t included a comparable blackberry sauce because I’m not familiar with a prepared form – it’s not preserves, a syrup, or a jelly. It’s one of those things you can really only get when you make it yourself.
| My Vanilla Pudding sugar cornstarch salt skim milk egg organic vanilla extract* My Blackberry Coulis frozen blackberries sugar lemon juice | Jell-O Vanilla Instant Pudding & Pie Filling sugar modified cornstarch natural & artificial flavor salt disodium phosphate tetrasodium phosphate mono- & diglycerides artificial color yellow 5 yellow 6 BHA [milk] |
*I use organic vanilla extract because its ingredients are alcohol, water, and vanilla. Regular vanilla extract also includes corn syrup. Check the label on your bottle.
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