Tag Archives: rice pudding

Crème brûlée rice pudding

3 Replies

Sometimes you keep a recipe hanging round for years, meaning to make it. And then you do, and you’re glad you did – keep the recipe and, eventually, make it. This is one such. Like a lot of people, I was late to like rice pudding. In my Italian family we tended to have more of a rice cake – served sliced. I mean I liked it but I didn’t love it. And then of course, the more sloppy rice pudding was served at school and was, like everything about school dinners aside from the fluted shortbread rounds we were occasionally served (which were nectar) – awful.

Anyway when I finally made this it was supremely good. The original recipe calls for light brown sugar for the topping for brûlée-ing but I don’t think it worked great. We have three blow torches, of various degrees of industry and I couldn’t really get any of them to do what I wanted, so in the end I shoved it under the grill. This recipe is originally from BBC Good Food, some time ago now..

75g butter

175g short-grain pudding rice

140g light muscovado sugar

500ml double cream

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

500-600ml full fat milk

Demerara for sprinkling on top to make the brûlée topping (optional but really good)

Get a large-ish sauce pan that can eventually take all the ingredients. Melt the 75g of butter until it starts sizzling and then add the rice. Stir the175g of rice around for 4-5 minutes until the butter starts to turn golden, then stir in the 140g muscovado sugar and cook for a few minutes more until the sugar starts to dissolve.

Now pour in the 500ml of cream, stir and boil gently unil all the sugar has dissolved and you have a thick butterscotch sauce, now gradually stir in 500ml of the milk and the vanilla.

Simmer all of this for 45 minutes, I stirred every three minutes to stop it catching at the bottom as it has a tendency to at the beginning. Towards the end the rice should feel cooked – not mushy – and if you need to add the extra 100ml of milk (I never need to). You should have what looks like a creamy risotto.

When it’s done pour into a shallow heat proof dish – I use a square Le Creuset. Sprinkle the sugar over the top and either blow torch or put it under a grill for about 5 minutes until the top is golden and set. This might not happen uniformly: don’t worry. It’s still delicious. TBH it’s still amazing without its brûlée hat.

I like this about 30 mins after it’s done, but it’s also good later, if kept at room temperature. It can of course be stored in the fridge – and should be if you are leaving it for more than a few hours – but give it a quick blast in the microwave before eating to loosen it, if you don’t have time to bring it back to room temperature. That said my eldest loves it cold. I don’t.

It’s delicious and comforting and that’s what I need right now.

Rice pudding with salted caramel syrup

1 Reply
Donna Hay’s chilled rice pudding with caramel. ©donna hay

Rice pudding isn’t something I grew up liking. My mother made it, although hers was more of a rice pudding cake – you could cut big slices of it. It was perfectly nice but not for me.

Then one day I discovered this rice pudding, which was all creamy and vanillay and slow cooked and I was hooked. (The recipe for the actual rice pudding is in the article, the article however refers to oat pudding and I do realise that…)

I am a big fan of Donna Hay. I get her magazine whenever I can find it, and even though she often talks about winter recipes when it’s summer here in the UK (she’s Australian), it’s beautiful and her recipes are amazing. And unlike Martha Stewart Living, the recipes are converted to metric: it’s not all a cup of this or a stick of that.

Anyway. Here is her recipe for Chilled Rice Pudding with Caramel. A few notes.

It’s a helluva lot of milk and cream. I think you could probably get away with not adding the extra lot of cream and milk you add when you take it off the heat. See how you feel. Or add less. I added the full amount and it makes for a very wet and loose pudding.

Delicious, but you can’t really cut into it with a spoon and leave an indentation, as seen in her picture above.

Two: I didn’t use dulce de leche. I use my own secret recipe for salted caramel and I just poured it on ever so slightly warm, I didn’t loosen it with more cream like the recipe suggests, as by that stage, I was starting to fear for my heart.

Even though it’s a chilled pudding, it’s immensely comforting. Here is a picture of my version:

Oat pudding, or porridge pudding, in the style of rice pudding

Leave a reply
I ate all of the strip missing just waiting for it to cool.

I recently discovered a really lovely, easy, recipe for a rice pudding that is simple but creamy without being laden with too much fat or sugar  (on the Waitrose site). Every time we have too much milk in the house I make it. I love having a pudding you can so easily heat up, and yet is so comforting in the house.

But I still felt slightly guilty eating it, mostly cos of the pudding rice which is hardly the world’s most nutritious food stuff. And then I thought what would happen if I made it with coarse cut oatmeal, which is low in fibre, said to lower cholesterol and generally add 10 years to your life? This was also borne out of the fact that I love porridge, but often can’t be arsed to make it first thing, especially not the ‘really good’ kind that takes ten minutes of stirring (sorry, not interested in cooking porridge in the microwave).

So I tried it with oats – coarse cut oatmeal – and I love it. The incredibly slow cooking makes it taste really creamy, even though it’s only using semi skimmed milk. And the bay leaves and vanilla give it an incredible flavour, without adding calories. I guess you could try to do it with half water/half milk (how I make my porridge on the stove top) and I might try to cut the sugar down a teensy bit more. But I wouldn’t play with this too much, because it’s actually very good. I take a slice of a morning, heat it up in the microwave, add fruit if I want to, or seeds, and in under two minutes you’ve got ace porridge.

If you don’t like porridge or rice pudding, there’s little chance you’ll like this. If you do though, give this a try and let me know what you think.

600ml semi skimmed milk
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
2 bay leaves (i use dried)
A sprinkling of sea salt
50g coarse cut oatmeal (or pudding rice if you want to make this into rice pudding, in which case up the sugar to 3 tablespoons and omit the salt)
2 tablespoons caster sugar
2 tablespoons of flaked almonds

Preheat the oven to 150C. Put the milk, vanilla extract and the bay leaves (tear them a little) into a saucepan and heat until almost boiling. Remove from the heat and leave to cool a little.

Lightly grease a 1.3L shallow oven proof dish. For ease (until the milk is absorbed this can spill), I put the dish on a baking tray. Scatter the oatmeal, salt and sugar around the dish. Then strain the milk over the top (discard the bay leaves).

Cover with foil and bake for one hour. After an hour, remove the foil, stir, cover with the foil again and cook for another 30 mins.

After this, remove the foil, sprinkle the almonds on top and then put back into the oven (uncovered, you’re done with the foil now), for another 30 mins. If your oven has a ‘top oven’ function, use it. I use it at this point – for the last half hour – to brown the top.

Eat. Enjoy. It’s porridge, but not as you know it.