I’m curious if anyone still makes pudding from a scratch recipe anymore?
Has the boxed stuff from Jello completely taken over?
For that matter, is it all Instant pudding mix? Do they even still sell the pudding mix that you cook?
I made Panna Cotta with a Mixed Berry Coulis for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I’d never had Panna Cotta, much less made it. Turns out it’s Italian for “Vanilla Pudding”.* 
It was good, but honestly, not really worth the effort. Were I to do it again, I’d make the pudding from a mix and the berry coulis from scratch. That was worth it.
*This is a joke. It’s Italian for “cooked cream”.
If you have the ingredients, homemade chocolate pudding is just as easy to make as the cook n’ stir from the box and is about a thousand times better. (I haven’t made ‘instant’ pudding in decades, yuck!!! That’s for little children, to make by themselves with mommy’s supervision.)
Chocolate Pudding
Mix in a pan with a wisk 1/2 C. sugar, 3 TB. cocoa powder, 1/4 C. cornstarch, and a dash of salt.
Wisk in 2-3/4 C. of milk, stirring like mad to make sure there are no lumps, and bring to a boil. Immediately turn down the heat to a simmer and continue stirring till it thickens up to coat a spoon. Add a drop of vanilla and maybe a pat of butter and stir in and… There it is, a thousand times better than the nasty little boxes.
That’s the only pudding recipe I know, but I used to make it all the time, much to the amazement of my young daughter’s friends (who never saw any home cookin’ ever done in their McMansion dwellings).
It makes a skin, but if you don’t like skin on your pud, lay a piece of saran wrap over the top when it’s still warm and remove when it cools.
Yep, I make pudding from scratch. I use a recipe similar to what ** salinqmind** mentioned. I like the skin.
I used to make custards from scratch. Poured it into 4 small, single serving glass bowls and baked in a pan of water. The pan of water keeps it from getting rubbery.
Custard is easy and never gets lumps. I haven’t tried pudding. Banana pudding with vanilla wafers is my favorite. My grandmother made a really good one.
Not sure if it can be truly considered pudding from scratch, but I have been making custard, which is essentially the same as vanilla pudding from Harry Horne’s custard powder for about 40 years. Heat the milk, add some sugar, dissolve the powder in a bit of cold milk and then add it to the milk in the pot when it starts to boil. Easy peasy, and you can adjust the amount of sugar if you don’t want it super sweet and the amount of powder if you want a thicker or thinner pudding.
I do at work. Our chocolate cream pie and coconut cream pie are made from puddings I cook up. There’s sugar, egg yolks, milk, cornstarch, and a dash of salt in it. The chocolate also has cocoa powder. Cooked in a big double boiler.
Messy but worth it, I think the pies I make are pretty darn good, since I also make the crust from scratch.
Now I need to go have my arm put in a cast. I’ve broken it patting myself on the back!
I made popcorn on the stove, in a pan, for some kids and they were amazed as well. They didn’t know you could make popcorn except in a microwave.
Have you ever made homemade macaroni and cheese? Here’s our go-to recipe, super easy (takes about 15 minutes prep plus cooking time, if that), totally unhealthy, totally delicious. After eating this, Kraft mac 'n cheese is a revoltingly flavorless latex slurry.
Back to pudding: make some homemade pudding sometime. After eating it, Jello pudding is, you guessed it, a revoltingly flavorless latex slurry. It’s good for eating if you want to roleplay that your universal fabricator is fritzing out and the entire crew is going to starve if you don’t consume the raw fabricator material canisters, but I don’t know why else you’d eat it.
Meh, I’ve made **vanilla **pudding from scratch and it’s basically no different in terms of taste than the boxed kind.
I did find the texture to be more satisfying though.
I made pudding from scratch for the first time almost two years ago. It was so easy to do and completely delicious. It really makes me wonder why anyone would use instant after that when it was already so easy. The hardest part was finding the right size bowl and pan to fake a double boiler.
Are you joking about this? Panna Cotta shouldn’t be like vanilla pudding at all, unless you’re lumping all soft, semi-liquidy desserts (pudding/custard/panna cotta/mousse/etc) together in one category. Which I admit, they’re similar, but definitely not the same, and definitely not so similar that you’d have any doubt what you’d put in your mouth. Panna Cotta isn’t cooked, it’s sweetened milk or cream thickened with gelatin and has that jiggly quality that Jello has. Pudding is cooked and thickened with a starch (typically cornstarch) and has a texture like… pudding.
Back to the OP: yeah, homemade pudding is incredibly easy to make, much better than store-bought, and can be made with stuff that’s usually in people’s pantries (milk, cornstarch, sugar, flavorings). That last bit is a major plus in my book.
Banana pudding should always be made from scratch, following the time-honored family recipe: the one on the back of the Nabisco Nilla Wafer box. It’s very quick and easy, and my kids would revolt if I were to try to vary the recipe. Otherwise, we don’t eat much pudding around here.
I only make it from scratch. I prefer it with eggs in the recipe, and the boxed stuff doesn’t have that eggy flavor.
I make chocolate pudding at least twice a month. It’s my ‘go to’ dessert when I run out of ingredients for other things.
I agree that homemade pudding is just as easy to make as boxed pudding mixes. Plus, you can feel good knowing that the ingredients came from your own humble kitchen.
I made the most beautiful homemade lemon pudding last summer with a fresh blueberry sauce on top. It looked beautiful in parfait glasses.
I split the difference; I won’t make the instant puddings because they have a really unpleasant mouthfeel, but I do make the cooked puddings from a box.
On the other hand, Kozy Shack makes a very nice chocolate pudding.
Then apparently I suck at making Panna Cotta. It was Cook’s Illustrated version, which I think you can find at their website, but you need a membership. I got it out of their Best Recipes book. Best I recall, it was warm the milk, bloom the gelatin (or maybe it was bloom the gelatin, warm the milk/gelatin? I don’t recall), add the cream, sugar, salt and vanilla bean and stir. And stir and stir and stir over an ice bath for 10 minutes and then strain and then chill.
It had a more complex vanilla flavor because I used a bean, but other than that…yeah, pretty much rich vanilla pudding. But for what it’s worth, I’d have to have a gun to my head to distinguish custard from pudding (I’d pick the richer one as custard), so maybe I’m just a philistine when it comes to soft dairy desserts.
My first ex-husband has put me through a finely serrated ringer of hell, and I can still smile when I remember that he used to make me homemade tapioca pudding. All that stirring! Eventually he did switch to the Jello stuff and it was fine really, but that warm, homemade tapioca was awesome. Like, felony-forgetting awesome.
I don’t know why, but whenever I go to a warehouse store (Costco/Sam’s Club), I am always sorely tempted to buy the big #10 can of chocolate pudding. The thought of that much chocolate pudding in one place is strangely intoxicating.
When I make pudding I do it from scratch - it’s just as easy as the box.