Now I am all for foolproof, since I seem to have a knack for mangling the simplest of recipes. But it gets even better. The author promises the dessert will take no more than 20 minutes, and it calls for a vanilla bean. A foolproof dessert that takes 20 minutes to make and calls for only 4 ingredients? Who wouldn't want to try making such a dessert? Plus other than the lack of fresh fruit, it sounded like a very quintessentially summery-sounding dessert.
I bought all of the requisite ingredients (whole milk and a vanilla bean, since I already had the sugar and corn starch and salt) last weekend and set out to make it sometime this week.
Unfortunately, I had a little mishap w/ the milk expiring before I ever got around to making the dessert, but undeterred, I got another container of milk.
The recipe calls for 2.5 cups of whole milk or half-and-half and 2/3 cups of sugar. It wasn't quite the appalling 1 cup of sugar that I often see in recipes, but the sugar content still seemed a tad high, so I cut it to 1/2 cup, which granted, isn't a whole lot less than 2/3 cup.
Well, after mixing the sugar, milk and vanilla bean in a saucepan for a bit and tasting it, I decided that even with this slight reduction, it was still too cloyingly sweet for my tastes. What is it w/ recipes and their annoying penchant to overestimate the amount of sugar one needs to put in a recipe? Anyway, I ended up dumping the entire carton of milk--which btw, is twice the amount of milk that the recipe originally calls for--into the saucepan. The result?
Not counting the cooling time, the dessert did really only take about 20 minutes to make. I was a little skeptical about the corn-starch overpowering the delicate flavors of the vanilla, which it did a little when it was hot, but when cooled, the corn-starchiness disappeared.
The end product lived up to my expectations. It was simple to make, called for minimal ingredients, and tasted yummy. I would still cut the sugar even more, perhaps, if I were making it for myself (especially if I plan to have it as part of breakfast as I did today. . .), but it came out quite well, otherwise, and looked cool, bespeckled with vanilla bean specks.
The recipe calls for either vanilla bean or vanilla extract, but if you are like me and get excited at the sight of real vanilla bean specks, it is well worth the $3 or $4 per vanilla bean pod to splurge for the real thing. I mean, look at how beautiful the specks look amid the pristine white surface:
On the other hand, if you decide to go for option b. and turn it into a chocolate pudding (by adding a few finely chopped up shards of chocolate to your liking), then don't bother with the vanilla bean. Vanilla extract will suffice.I discovered that it makes a good weekend "almost breakfast" item (hey, the milk has protein!). I think this one is going in my dessert scrap book.
No comments:
Post a Comment