69. Simple Stovetop Rice Pudding

Date Cooked: February 7, 2009
Page: 956
Rating: B

I’m not a huge fan of rice pudding. It might have something to do with the association of raisins in rice pudding from my childhood. My wife however loves rice pudding (without raisins of course) and had requested I make this recipe, as long as I left out the raisins. Imagine my surprise when the recipe didn’t call for them!

This is a rather simple recipe to put together as long as you have lots of time to stand around and stir. The first step was to cook the medium grain rice. Originally I went to the grocery store and was going to purchase a bag of medium grain rice when I noticed that they had a bag of rice advertised for use in sushi. The same bag I had at home at the back of my pantry for the past 3 years (or longer). I checked the ingredient list and sure enough it was just regular medium grain rice. So I figured I would take a chance and hope that rice doesn’t go bad. The rice cooked for 15 minutes and seemed perfectly fine so onto the next step.

To the pot of cooked rice I added 2 cups of half-and-half and 3 cups of whole milk. The recipe calls for 2 ½ cups of each but I didn’t feel like buying an additional 2 cups of half-and-half when I needed only a ½ cup more. The rest would probably have spoiled in my fridge. So to avoid waste I just added more milk. This did impact the recipe’s cooking time. Along with all this liquid was added sugar. This entire mixture cooked for an additional 30 minutes until it began to thicken. Once it started to thicken the heat was turned to low and cooked for what the book called 15 more minutes, until the spoon could almost stand up. In real life this meant 30 minutes. Does 75 minutes of cooking in liquid seem long for rice? I really expected the rice to be a complete mushy mash, but it didn’t turn out that way.

Once cooked, vanilla extract was stirred in and the pudding was allowed to cool.

Rating: B. I enjoyed the pudding, but it was almost too rich? I can’t quite put my finger on it but something held it back from being a real knock out. The flavor was great, the consistency was perfect but something just didn’t make me crave going back for more. My wife loved it though and it didn’t last too long in the house.