I love pudding.
To post an entire blog about pudding and my thoughts and feelings about it would take a while. And I’m lazy. But to summarize:
- I ate store-bought pudding cups on occasion as a kid (vanilla, chocolate, butterscotch).
- I went several years without pudding … a decade, even?
- In Berlin I came to love “Griess-Pudding” (basically a farina-centric pudding … literally “grit(s) pudding”).
- “Good Eats” brought me back to pudding and taught me about it; my Betty Crocker cookbook provided recipes and techniques I could rely on; and so I made puddings for myself and my friend.
- I became semi-obsessed with pudding’s cousins: baked custards and panna cotta.
Then I stopped making pudding for a while, forgot about it/them, and today thought: [a] it’s a new month, I should do something ‘new’, [b] I’d like something for dessert tonight, and I’ve already calculated the rest of my daily food intake … which left plenty to spare; and [3] Ms. S. deserves a vegan treat.
It’s October and pumpkin was on my mind, which led to Peta’s pumpkin pudding, but I wanted to go a bit simpler than that. I have cocoa powder, to make that tastier, adding a little extra fat helps, so I decided to put off chocolate pudding until later. So vanilla it was, and about.com’s basic vanilla pudding recipe is basiclaly just “milk,” cornstarch, sugar, and vanilla. Milk might as well be soy, almond, coconut, rice, or “other.”
Ingredients:
- 3/4 cup Diamond “Almond Breeze” vanilla almond-coconut milk
- 1/4 cup vanilla soy milk
- 2 Tbsp ‘sugar’
- 10g cornstarch (1 Tbsp + 1/2 tsp, about)
- pinch of salt
- 1/2 tsp vanila extract
Directions:
- Mix “milks,” sugar, salt, and cornstarch in a saucepan, and whisk while bringing to a simmer.
- Reduce heat and continue to stir until:
- the mixture is entirely smooth and
- the mixture coats a spoon
- Remove from heat and stir in vanilla extract.
- Portion into 2 pudding/custard cups, cover, and refrigerate several hours until set.
Serving Size: makes 2 half-cup servings
It helps, of course, not to think of this as soy milk “gravy.” Because the soy and almond-coconut milks were already a bit sweetened, the resulting pudding is on the sweeter side than if I’d used unsweetened soy milk or plain dairy, but the hot mixture was neither too sweet nor too intensely vanilla-flavored.
