Ultimate Rice Pudding

Silky Smooth Comfort Food

Now, I know what you are thinking, who wants a bowl of stodgy rice pudding? Well..me. I am, unashamedly, a big fan of the old school dish but only when made correctly. No gloopy bowls of rice pudding here thank you very much. This isn’t the nightmarish rice pudding of school dinners past, with a thick layer of skin and an almost glue like texture. This rice pudding is silky and creamy, packed full of vanilla and, most importantly, served cold. Cold rice pudding is the hill I am willing to die on, when the texture is right and the pudding is made with both milk and cream there is nothing that will comfort me more than a big bowl of the stuff. I also have the bad luck to be following up my recent bad back with a nasty bout of flu, so I feel especially well placed to sing the virtues of a bowl of rice pudding as self care. I just finished a bowl to get me through writing this post (thats my excuse anyway).

For the rice pudding recipe I first looked at the guide on the back of the bag of pudding rice I had lying about in the back of cupboard. Firstly, the recipe seemed rather austere, simply milk, a tiny bit of sugar and a tiny bit of butter. This was not the comforting dish I was looking for. Secondly, the recipe seemed particularly low in moisture. I just knew the recipe was going to end up like a gloopy mess, sticky and dense. The opposite of what I was after.

To make the perfect rice pudding I did two things. Firstly I used a mix of milk and cream, because why use one type of dairy when you can use two. The other thing I did was a tip I gleaned from the pastry chef Anna Higham. In her sublime rice pudding recipe she cooks the dish on the hob as usual but as it cools down stirs in a little extra milk to ensure the pudding has that perfectly silky texture. In her recipe Anna does that with milk, I topped it up with a little more cream. What I noticed was not only does this improve the texture it also improves the taste, it reduces the flavour of cooked dairy and ups the flavour of fresh dairy, a double win as far as I am concerned.

Serves 6

100g pudding rice (other short grained varieties will work too)
850ml whole milk
300ml double cream
15g unsalted butter
75g caster sugar
1 vanilla pod
Pinch of salt

Add the pudding rice, milk, half of the cream, butter and sugar to a large saucepan and mix to combine. Cut the vanilla pod in half and scrape out the seeds, adding the seeds and the pod itself to the pot. Add the salt and mix to combine.

Place the pan over medium/high heat and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to low and cook at the barest of simmers for about 40 minutes. The pudding is ready when the rice is tender and the liquid reduced. If serving the pudding warm it is ready to serve immediately, simply remove the vanilla bean and divide the pudding into bowls. If, like me, you prefer to serve the pudding cold pour into a container and press a sheet of clingfilm onto the surface of the pudding to prevent it forming a skin. Refrigerate until chilled, at least 4 hours. When ready to serve, stir through the remaining cream to loosen the texture of the pudding. If the cream doesn’t quite do the job add a splash of milk as well. Spoon the pudding into bowls and top as you prefer. I went with poached rhubarb but a dollop of jam also works great if you want something super easy.