I woke up from an afternoon nap the other day with a craving for something sweet. For some reason whenever I nap, I usually wake up with a sweet craving. I wish I knew why that was. It seems so strange. Whatever the reason, it was there, and this one was stronger than most. I lay in bed and pondered my options, trying to put a point on my desire. Peanut butter cookies? Toffee? Fudge? No, none of these were quite right. Then it hit me: chocolate pudding.
Right on the heels of my revelation was the realization of the inherent difficulty of chocolate pudding in Mexico. I have had passing pudding fancies before, and I have looked. There are no boxes of pudding on the store shelf. There are approximately 432 choices of gelatin desserts in any given market, but no pudding. And that's the only way I know how to make pudding. I pondered a bit more.
I finally decided that pudding existed before Jello put it in a convenient pull-top box, so there has to be a way to make it with actual ingredients. I swung my feet out of bed and headed to my computer. Google is my recipe box. I searched "chocolate pudding recipe" and started to examine the 1,160,000 results.
Admittedly, I have never really looked at a pudding recipe, being a from-the-box girl and all, but these couldn't be right. I saw recipes that required egg yolks and folding in beaten egg whites to make them lighter and butter and water baths. This couldn't possibly be pudding. Custard or mousse or soufflé maybe, but not pudding. And good lord were they complicated! The recipes called for the employment of double boilers and food processors and immersion blenders. I found it inconceivable that pudding could have survived as such a popular dish if it were this complicated. And I find it hard to believe that anyone's grandmother had a Cuisinart. No, pudding had to be much simpler.
I started to cobble together my own recipe based on ingredients which were common to many of the recipes and then used my knowledge of how those things interact to come up with measurements. Of course, by this time my craving had passed, but I was on a mission.
I started with some basics: milk, sugar, cocoa powder, corn starch, salt, vanilla. That seemed reasonable. When I was getting the cocoa powder out of the cabinet, I spotted a box of media crema, so I decided to substitute that for part of the milk. When I was digging around in the refrigerator, my eye fell on the stack of Hershey bars that have resided there since we moved. Several people had said that when traveling in Mexico you should always have some Hershey bars and Cokes to offer to people who had the authority to make things go easier for you at checkpoints and border crossings, which, as far as I can tell is a load of bull, but I can't say for sure. Things went so smoothly everywhere we went that we never had the opportunity to test the hypothesis. We had bought an entire box at Costco, and there they still sat, languishing in the back of the fridge. I grabbed one and decided to throw it in, too.
I whisked and boiled and very quickly came out with a pudding mixture that was quite thick. I thought "it looks like pudding" and spooned it into ramekins, put them in the fridge, and waited impatiently for them to chill. I am not a warm pudding kind of person.
Finally, two hours later, Chuck and I each grabbed a pudding and a spoon and sat down to try my new creation. I stuck my spoon in – and came out with the entire pudding. I had made gummy pudding. The flavor was right. The sweetness was perfect, not too sugary, but enough to satisfy a sweet craving. It was just really, really firm, my own personal version of chocolate gomitas. Big, chocolate gomitas.
The next day, a little deflated by the failure, I tried again. Long story short, I overcompensated. I wouldn't call it soup, but I wouldn't call it pudding either. I was starting to feel like Goldie Locks: "That one is too hard. This one is too soft". Hopefully, the third try would be just right.
I calculated, whisked, boiled, and poured again. After chilling, the cups of pudding looked right, but, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I was a little nervous. After all, I had already messed this up twice before and had only the most basic idea of what I was doing. I swirled my spoon through the bowl. Looked good. I opened my mouth and took a taste...creamy, chocolaty, silky yumminess. This is what I wanted.
Chocolate Pudding
3/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup cocoa powder, preferably Dutch process
3 tbsp. corn starch
1/2 tsp. salt
2 cups milk
1 250ml box media crema (or 1 cup half and half, or just another cup of milk. Relax, this is supposed to be easy, remember?)
1 Hershey bar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Put sugar, cocoa powder, corn starch, and salt in a heavy 3 quart sauce pan and stir well until you have a uniform mixture. Very slowly mix in the milk, a little bit at a time, until all of the dry ingredients are wet. It is important to do this slowly to ensure the corn starch is evenly incorporated, otherwise you get lumpy pudding. Add the media crema and stir to combine.
Heat over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture starts to boil, about five minutes. Continue stirring and boiling for another minute to cook and set the corn starch. Your mixture should have the consistency of thick cake batter. If it is already very thick, remove from heat and add milk until the desired consistency is reached. If it is thin, continue to stir and boil until the mixture thickens.
Remove pan from heat. Break the Hershey bar into pieces and drop into the pudding. Let sit until the heat from the pudding melts the chocolate, about 30 seconds. Add the vanilla and stir until everything is well mixed.
Pour pudding into ramekins and chill in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours. Grab a spoon and enjoy.
Serves: 6-8 portions, depending on the size of your ramekins.
Prep time: 10 minutes active, 2 hours 10 minutes total.
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|SAdministrator |m-d-Y H:i:s jenniferThat is a beautiful pie. Just gorgeous.
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just made an apple pie
click picture to see larger image.