National Rice Pudding Day

Just like how every food culture has a version of meat-on-a-stick (kebabs, souflaki, brochettes, etc.), every food culture has a version of rice pudding. Why? Rice pudding is delicious, inexpensive, and uses ingredients that everybody has: rice, milk, sweetener, and flavouring. It can be savoury or sweet, though for the purpose of this blog I have chosen to neglect the savoury kind and indulge my sweet tooth for a week, and it’s really, very easy to make! Over the course of this week, I have eaten four servings of pudding, and have sampled nearly ten different flavours, giving me the knowledge and experience to share with you the ultimate in rice pudding.

For some research into flavours and a bit of inspiration I started at Riz en Folie (On Mackay, just south of Sherbrooke, for you Montrealers), a teeny restaurant that serves only rice pudding. Set up like an ice cream parlour, when you go inside, the different puddings are all displayed under glass and you get to sample each flavour before you make your decision. Riz en Folie uses short grain sushi rice and bakes their pudding. It has a super creamy texture with a sort of tapioca pudding vibe – lots of pudding, only a little rice. This past Tuesday, I went for lunch (sort of) with friends and between the five of us we sampled seven of ten flavours on display that day.  Again, like an ice cream parlour, Riz en Folie does your standard vanilla and chocolate; “rough & tough”, a sort of rocky road flavour; and a mint-chocolate. Of these flavours, I tried the mint-chocolate. It tasted as weird as it looked:

While the flavour started out like its delicious, ice cream counterpart, its finish was unfortunately reminiscent of the “almost mint” flavour found in oral hygiene products, particularly floss.  A rough start, but Riz en Folie did redeem themselves with some of their other flavours:

Original: It was sweet and creamy and hardly spiced, if at all. The girls who tried it found it light and described it as “nice” and “yummy.”

Sucre a la crème: This one was like the original, but more. It was more sweet, and more creamy, and heavier and denser. I asked about the flavours and the response was, “It’s not that it has different flavour… it’s just MORE. It’s better than the Original.”

Exotika Passion:  “What does taste like?” “It tastes like passion fruit.”  “…weird.”

Rose Water: The flavour was so light and delicate that it was almost bland – at least when tasted next to the other very sweet puddings. Rose water didn’t seem like it could stand alone as a flavour. The pudding was obviously missing something we thought.

Lemon: Straight up lemon curd. It was oh-so-delicious like lemon pie filling and was the one I chose to have a full serving of.

Carrot cake: This one was definitely the team favourite. It was very lightly spiced and the flavour was very fresh and carroty.  It was more like a carrot ice cream or cheese cake. Very good!

I left with a different idea was what I expected from rice pudding. Though it’s obvious now, I never would have thought to do anything more to it then add cinnamon and sugar, never mind lemon or passion fruit.  Since I had Friday off work, I did a little reading up on rice pudding recipes and picked a few to try out. I invited a couple friends over and with my roommate, my old roommate, and a coworker we binged on 3 rice puddings:

Our trio of rice puddings for the evening

Black Rice Pudding

I got this one off Epicurious.  Such a simple recipe, and it looked so cool in the photo, I decided I had to try it. It was probably the most basic recipe I found and the truest to the natural simplicity of the dessert:

1 cup black rice

3 cups water

1 can coconut milk (1 ½ cups for cooking and the rest for garnish)

A pinch of salt and sugar to taste

[Gourmet, December 2005]

Bring to boil rice, salt, and water in a large pot. Reduce to simmer and cover for 30 to 45 minutes, until the water is absorbed. Stir in a roughly a cup and a half of coconut milk and sugar to taste (I added about a half cup) and cook until creamy and pudding-like. Let it cool, or eat it warm and serve with coconut milk poured over top.

This pudding was a little chewier since black rice doesn’t get at gooey and mushy as white rice. It has a really nice nutty, sweet flavour and anyone without a big sweet tooth would probably appreciate this one for it more subtle flavour.

Banana-Anise Pudding

Soooo, it didn’t really work. This recipe was dictated to me by one of the kitchen staff at work (I chose the flavours and he gave me portions of each ingredient), but I must have missed an instruction. It tasted great! But, there obviously was not enough liquid and the rice ended up not so pudding-y and a lot like… rice. This one was done in the oven, and I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t precook the rice or that I needed more cream, but the texture didn’t work out at all. I’m planning on trying this again, as aniseed and banana and coconut milk were meant to be together, but this time maybe they can mingle on the stove top where I’m clearly more apt. If you wanted to try it, combine your rice of choice, cream, coconut milk, mashed ripe banana, LOTS of aniseed (we’re talking at least a couple teaspoons), and sugar to taste and bake covered at 350F for 45 minutes to an hour. I’ll leave it to you to portion out the ratios though so perhaps you have more luck than I did!

Rose Water-Cardamom Pudding

AAH, SO GOOD. The rose water rice pudding at Riz en Folie was lacking, but it has the potential to be amazing! More rose water, some cardamom, and some vanilla make for the favourite rice pudding. On epicurious I found a recipe for a guideline. The amount of sugar in this recipe was waaay too much. I cut it in half  to 3/4 cup and it was still quite sweet. Here is what I did:

½ cup Arborio rice

3 cups cream

½ to ¾ cups sugar

Some cornstarch (optional, maybe?)

1 tablespoon Rose Water

Some cardamom (I write my recipes more like mum every day. By “some” I guess I mean to taste.)

Some Vanilla

Bring to boil one cup of water, add rice, reduce to simmer and let the water absorb. Add 3 cups of cream (I used 10%), cornstarch, sugar, rose water, cardamom, and vanilla, stir it all up thoroughly and bring to boil again. Watch that pot or else it will boil over and make a pretty awful mess on your stove top. Reduce to a simmer and cover partly. Stir periodically and cook until it has the pudding consistency that you want. This will fit into 4 ramekins. Allow it to cool. It might make a skin/film on top, but if you give a good stir before you serve it, it will look and taste just fine.  I dyed mine pink and sprinkled it with pistachios for a garnish. It looked quite cute I think.

This one is my favourite rice pudding now! After extensive research, this is the best in Rice pudding. It was creamy, but the rice was still present. The flavour was very rosy and spiced and sweet and just wonderful.  From these 3 recipes, I have made a sort of criteria for my ultimate pudding: done with Arborio rice and on the stove top.  The Arborio made for a really fantastic texture and the stove top gives you more control; you see if you need more liquid or taste if you need more sugar or spice.

The Greek men at the cafe-bar I worked at during world cup say that Efes, the Turkish bakery across the street, makes the best rice pudding – “it’s better than my mom’s.” I haven’t tried it yet, but it might be worth the trek out to Parc-Ex to see if my number one can be beat.

Also, Happy Birthday Dad!

Best,

Monique

National Soyfoods Month!

Ahoy Ahoy Friends. April 21 National Chocolate-Covered Cashews Day or Chocolate-Covered Cashew Truffle Day…but since I’ve already blogged about cashews and chocolate truffles, I decided to instead to shed a little light onto Soyfoods Month.

Edamame

So, soy. What once was a delicacy of eastern cooking, is now truly ubiquitous in north american diets. Food manufacturers have recognized that this little wonder-legume oil seed is a cheap source of oil and protein. It also has a mild taste and a chameleon like property which allows it to slip unnoticed into almost any food to bulk it up. There is soy in your breakfast cereal, potato chips, salad dressing, and your chicken tenders. And this reliance on soy as a filler won’t end anytime soon. As this planet has more and more mouths to feed, soybeans become an natural source of protein, because they are very efficient: Soybeans can produce at least twice as much protein per acre than any other major vegetable or grain crop, 5 to 10 times more protein per acre than land set aside for grazing animals to make milk, and up to 15 times more protein per acre than land set aside for meat production.

Soy is also one of those foods that people have strong feeling about. For every website touting the health benefits of soy (low cholesterol, cancer fighting), there is another warning of the dangers of soy -mainly related to having too much estrogen in your system (i.e. endocrine disruption, increase in breast cancer) as there are natural phyto-estrogens in soy. I have no opinion, other than to say–everything in moderation, ok?

In honor of Soyfood Month, I devised a little dinner for my friend April and I. We had edamame (with salt and lime) as a starter, a stirfry with tofu and soy sauce on brown rice, and finished the night with a dairy-free lemon pudding. Soytastic!

DB’s Tofu Strifry:

In a wok or deep skillet, gently heat 1 tbs cooking oil and 1 tbs sesame oil over medium heat. Gently fry two cloves of garlic, and grate in some frozen ginger.

When the garlic is slightly brown, toss is your veggies – chopped up peppers, cauliflower, carrot ribbons, broccoli etc. Gently stirfy–if necessary add a little water to the pan to steam slightly.

dsc 0285

When the veg are tender crisp, toss in some cubed firm tofu and baby corn. Add 3/4c Rub with Love Ginger Teriyaki Sauce. This is a great line of small batch sauces coming out of Seattle. Or make it yourself, but mixing up some brown sugar, soy sauce, rice vinegar, garlic, pineapple juice, ginger, star anise and sesame seeds.

When the sauce is nice and thick and bubbly, and the tofu and corn is heated through, serve over rice.

dsc 0292

… and just when you thought you couldn’t eat anything else:

April’s Lemony Goodness Pudding

1 lb silken tofu
3/4 c cane sugar
6 tbs fresh lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 c oil (canola or veggie)

Blend all ingredients in blender, put in fridge several house so it will firm up.

April says this comes from a s. 1970’s English cookbook called “Tofu Cookery“).

Long Live the Bean!

~Dea

October 13 – National Yorkshire Pudding Day

Oops, I took a bite out of it before putting the gravy on it!

Because what you need right after Thanksgiving is a big ol’ roast beef and pastry roasted in fat.  Of course, we are celebrating American National Food Holidays because, sad to say, it seems that Canadians just aren’t as inspired by food as our friends to the south (trust me, I looked – we got nothin’).  So their turkey day isn’t for another month and in that context, it makes perfect sense to have roast beast and pudding as the days grow shorter and colder and we all start to get a yen for comfort food.  Incidentally, the Brits, who originated this delectable delicacy, (duhhhh … Yorkshire!) have their Yorkshire Pudding Day, more sensibly if you ask me, on February 1st.

It’s an incredibly versatile pastry, serving equally well as a conduit for gravy (their primary purpose), a musical inspiration and a marine transport.  Really, it’s a British icon traditionally served with Roast Beast.

The basic premise is that you heat a pan with some fat in it (using a hot oven), throw some sloppy, runny batter into the pan, toss it back in the oven and wait for a bit.  You can find out all about that here.  I didn’t use that recipe though.  I used the one from the Boston Globe cookbook ’cause it looked simpler but I couldn’t find an online version so you can look it up if you’re really that keen.  My roast beef wasn’t done roasting yet ’cause I was busy making jambalaya in my new copper pot that I got for an early birthday present and that was the number one priority, so I didn’t have drippings from the roast, but what I did have was the fat I had skimmed off my ham stock that I had thawed out to use in the jambalaya, so I used that in the pan for the yorkshire puddings.  Looked disgusting, but I was sure it would turn out great and it did.

Hog fat in a muffin tin

They were really big muffin tins, but I'll admit, the puddin's didn't rise spectacularly well

Ate my yorkshire pudding on the side of my jambalaya in the company of P and D and a nice Chianti. May have, as it turns out, been too much starch for me.  In any event, then I made gravy with the drippings of the (sadly overdone) roast beef (this is what happens when you have to go put a baby to bed in the middle of making two dinners at the same time) which I made better by adding lots of red wine and shitake and chantrelle mushrooms.  It was a really pretty gravy.

Real Brown Gravy - the chunks are delicious mushroomy bits

Right now P is re-creating Angel Food Cake day with a trio of toppings for the leftover cake.  This blog is going to be really bad for our diets!

Clockwise from top: My brown butter banana rum sauce w/blueberries, with praline ice cream, and with (yech!) vanilla icing out of a tin.

‘Til next time 🙂

B.