It’s difficult to make a picture of rice pudding look exciting or glamorous but for those of us who love it, beauty is not the important thing. It’s the taste and the thickness of the skin!
I have loved rice pudding for as long as I can remember. I was recently reminiscing with my brother about my mum’s excellent rice pudding and he reminded me about how much we argued over who was to have the skin! My mum used to make it using full cream milk (semi-skimmed was not invented then, there was only ordinary milk or, better still, gold top) and if we were lucky, partly with evaporated milk. It was served hot, thick and creamy, and occasionally there would be a few sultanas or raisins in it, which was known in the family as Chinese wedding cake.
We loved it hot, sometimes with a blob of strawberry jam, or cold and even stiffer the following day.
Soon after I bought my new mini slow cooker I was keen to use it to make a rice pudding.
I warmed the milk before adding it to the pot and stirred a couple of times during cooking. My brother said that the only time he made it in a slow cooker he ended up with the rice stuck on the bottom and the milk on top, which was disappointing to say the least, but he hadn’t thought to stir it.
Cooking time depends on how stiff you like your rice pudding and how thick you like the skin. The longer you leave it, the stiffer and more delicious it becomes.
I am contributing this post to the Slow Cooked Challenge, run by Janice at Farmersgirl Kitchen. It’s an open theme this month and you can read the details here.
I was very pleased to discover later that you can actually buy pudding rice in France. Having used up the packet of pudding rice brought over from the UK I had been using arborio rice but, according to Nigella Lawson, it is not quite the same as pudding rice. Arborio rice still has a little firmness to it when cooked, which makes it ideal for her rice pudding cake (torta de riso), which I made and wrote about here. On that occasion I used pudding rice but arborio would have been more authentic. Pudding rice becomes completely soft when cooked, making it perfect for the traditional, old fashioned rice pudding. Horses for courses.
Ingredients
75g/3oz pudding rice
55g/2oz caster sugar
600ml/1 pint milk (full fat or semi-skimmed)*use 500ml for a thicker pudding that cooks more quickly
1 small tin, 170g evaporated milk (normal or light)
grated nutmeg
a few knobs of butter
Method
Rinse the rice and put into the slow cooker with the sugar and evaporated milk.
Warm the milk in a saucepan and add to the cooker. Stir well.
Sprinkle some grated nutmeg on the top and dot a few knobs of butter over.
Cook on low heat for 3-4 hours or longer, stirring a couple of times.
Serves 4.
