November 16, 2011

Tapioca Pudding (WIP)

I am a HUGE fan of tapioca pudding, which is odd since I don't really remember getting to eat it as a kid.  My first recollection of tapioca pudding is from my first "real" job outside of working at Boy Scout camp: stockboy at a little mom & pop grocery store.

I remember buying a can of tapioca pudding at the store, taping a receipt to it and placing it in the walk-in cooler to chill.  It was a decadent treat for me.

I've bought my fair share of pudding over the years and even made some "instant" pudding on more than one occasion.  Lately I've been trying to make pudding for my wife to take to to work as a snack.  Of course she's lucky if she gets any by the time I get through snacking on it.  Since I've started making pudding I've been switching to making it "from scratch" and have come up with the following recipe.  It is still a work in progress and I need to tweak it since the last batch wasn't quite as thick as I'd like.  I am thinking of adding some tapioca flour to the mix and not grinding the Tapioca pearls.  Once I get that down I may try using coconut milk to tweak the flavor even more.

Christopher's Tapioca Pudding
Ingredients
1 C Tapioca Pearls
6 C Milk (whole milk is best)
1/2 t salt
4 eggs
1 C Sugar (white refined is best)
1/8 t Nutmeg
1 T Vanilla Extract


Add the pearls to the milk and let sit for a few hours.  I prefer to roughly grind the pearls first in a food processor/mill of some type first and let it sit in the milk overnight.  I'm a bit on the lazy side and will take the mixture and place it in the saucepan and let it warm up to room temperature before continuing.

Cream together in a larger bowl 1 C Sugar, four eggs, and 1/8 t Nutmeg.  Set this aside while cooking the tapioca so it has time to warm up some.

Add 1/2 t salt to the tapioca and place the mixture into at least a 3 quart saucepan.  Heat, stirring constantly until boiling.  The pudding will thicken up quite a bit and "boiling" is a bit misleading since the mixture is thick.  It will puff and belch bubbles a bit, which is what you are looking for.  Turn the heat to the lowest setting and simmer for a couple minutes.

Take the tapioca off of the burner and add a small amount to the creamed egg/sugar mixture and blend well, continue adding small amounts of the hot tapioca to the eggs so that mixture slowly heats up.  You don't want to cook the eggs.  When that mixture is hot, add it back to the tapioca in the saucepan and place it back on the burner to cook for three more minutes.

Let the pudding cool for at least 15 minutes and add the vanilla.  You can eat it warm or let it cool.  If you want to chill the pudding, I recommend letting the pudding cool down to about room temperature and then placing it into containers in the fridge.  If you "box it up" too quickly the pudding might sweat and you end up with water on the surface which is less than appealing.

I also highly recommend these Ball Canning Plastic Preserving Jars.  My store only carries the 8 oz size, but these things rock.  First of all, it's a great serving size.  The lids screw in to the jar, which means they won't pop off on you.  The lids snap into each other for storage and the design is such that you can pretty much fit the bottom of the jar into the jar lid, making them stack stable in the fridge.


November 20, 2011 Edit: I made some more pudding and I found the amount of nutmeg to be far too much.  I thought that I had 1/8 t down and it was 1/4 t.  You may like the extra nutmeg, but I found it to be too much.  The resulting pudding isn't terrible, just not as good as it could be.

1 comment:

Dave2 said...

Tapioca pudding is weird. Eating it makes me gag a little bit. But chocolate pudding? NOW THAT'S A PUDDING!!