There was a thread recently about making pudding.When my kids were wee little bairns I used to make them a very simple pudding using milk and flour. They loved it (I found it a little bland but, hey, pudding!). That was many years ago and I haven’t made pudding since. So, I went searching for an easy from scratch pudding recipe and found this one: All Recipes’ Old-Fashioned Vanilla Pudding
Disaster! I ended up pouring it into a glass since it didn’t really thicken much at all. The consensus was that it sure tasted like vanilla pudding or maybe a Slimfast protein shake. I played around with the recipe and came up with one that works wonderfully. The only thing I changed was the ingredient list. I doubled the cornstarch and egg yolks, reduced the butter to a half a teaspoon and added a quarter cup half and half.
Should the original recipe have worked? Is there something I’m doing wrong? Also --and I hope there is a lot of in this thread-- links to disaster recipes! What went wrong and is there a fix.
I’ll take a guess that you didn’t heat the mix up to nearly the boiling point. This is needed to get the full thickening effect from the cornstarch. The instructions are an important part of a recipe, not just the ingredients. Of course sometimes the ingredients section is just wrong.
I’m pretty sure 1 tablespoon of cornstarch should have thickened 1 cup of milk.
Now I’m craving vanilla pudding so give me 10min. In the mean time, I also have to ask if you brought it up to a high enough temperature? Cornstarch needs to be hotter than flour to thicken properly (if I remember that correctly) so if you have a soupy mess it sounds like it didn’t get up to temperature.
ETA DON’T BOIL IT!!! You need to get up to about 180, and boiling is closer to 210. Higher than 180ish and you’re egg will curdle.
I thought perhaps a bit more heating would help. The second batch I made, I even left it alone without stirring to bring the temp up. It never got to the ‘thick and bubbly’ stage. Just the scorched bottom of the pot stage.
Of course I could be missing a happy medium between not hot enough and too hot. This heat thing would be a fine idea, especially since I’d like to double the recipe and doubling the original looks as if it would work better than doubling my fix-it recipe.
I made a batch of gluten-free green bean casserole for Thanksgiving this year that was a complete and utter disaster even though I’d made it successfully before.
Turned out what I read … and I stress this: read repeatedly as “2 lbs. butter” was, in fact, “2 Tbs. butter.”
I really need to go back to cooking with the lights on.
Keep in mind that while warm it’s a lot thinner than the stuff you find in the grocery store, which is what most people expect.
Scortched pans happen, and it sucks. I used a small non-stick saucier and keep the heat low. Like with any cooked custard I got the milk hot first. Wisked the egg yolk, sugar, salt, and cornstarch together. Added a little warm milk to that, then stirred it all together in the pan. It only took a minute or too to bubble and thicken.
It might help to heat the milk in the microwave for a couple minutes first, since it’s only 1cup.
Thanks for the recipe. And don’t worry, there are plenty out there that fail miserably.
“Stir a small amount of hot filling into egg yolk; return all to the pan, stirring constantly. Bring to a gentle boil; cook and stir 1 minute longer. Remove from the heat. Gently stir in butter and vanilla.”
They do it in two stages, which is fine, I did it in one. Did YOU follow that second step? Even without the yolk, 1 Tbs in a cup of milk will be reasonably thick if you “Cook and stir over medium heat until thickened and bubbly.”
Never got to the ‘thick and bubbly’ part. The first time I got to protein shake consistency. It thickened but no where near enough for pudding. I then coddled the yolk in as the recipe says, hoping that and the hour in the fridge would give me pudding. It didn’t.
The next time I let it get bubbly but that made it scorch.
The reason for that step, if anyone is interested, is to temper the egg yolks. It is possible to do it in one step, but, generally, to keep the yolks from curdling and turning into scrambled eggs, you have to gently bring them up to temperature. Also, one of the tricks with corn starch is to stir it enough to get any lumps out, but not too vigorously as this will cause it to “break.” For one cup of milk, I would use 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon corn starch rather than 1 tablespoon, but I generally don’t use egg, and that also has thickening properties.
We were given a “Best Cookie Recipes” book a few years ago. Each recipe was supposedly the winner of some cookie competition somewhere.
Each and every one of the recipes we tried (5) resulted in shitty shitty cookies. We gave up on that book.
My wife tried a homemade Nutella recipe on some blog…she should have read the user comments first. It resulted in decent but not good tasting bricks…but nothing spreadable. Each of the comments attested to this.
We kept, and I use it like stock for making something cocoa flavored.
For me it was Alton Brown’s Best Ever Gravy. It’s a damned dirty lie. I like Alton, but sometimes his recipes don’t match the quality of his methods, in this case it was egregiously so. The damned gravy came out purple and tasted like hot salty wine. That was a weird Thanksgiving.
Something is off there. One tablespoon of cornstarch in a cup of liquid will get you “reasonably thick gravy.” Which should be thicker than a protein shake. But because it’s warm will still be thinner than normal pudding consistency. The key though is to get it hot enough to gel. If you have time I’d suggest just mixing 1 Tbs of cornstarch with 1 cup of cold milk, then bringing it up to a simmer. Should thicken but taste like, well, thick milk.
When left to cool, this 1 cup of goo should set reasonably firm.
Adding one egg yolk to that 1 cup of thickened goo then cooking some more will add richness and a bit more thickening.
Nothing wrong though with adding a bit more cornstarch, and using some half and half.
And first I was going to make the blanket statement, “his recipes never work.”
When I clicked on it though, at first I thought, “well yeah, that sounds like good gravy.” Then I noticed his turkey recipe. Brining a bird is good, and makes a nice roast, but in all my experience the drippings are essentially useless. The point of brining is to get the meat to soak up salt, but obviously when it cooks that salt is going to come out with the juices making the drippings too salty to use.
The method is solid though, but the key is to really cook down the wine until it’s almost gone. Any point before that leaves the “purple wine like liquid.”
The casserole itself is delicious, but the onion topping he suggests works horrendously. Just ignore that part and use canned fried onions and it’s all good then.
I found a recipe for chicken tikka masala on Allrecipes once that would have been delicious, if not for the fact that it called for about four times as much salt as you’d want in such a dish. After tasting it, I read the comments on the recipe and pretty much every one of them was “needs less salt”.
I made stuffed mushrooms the other day, for the first time, and the recipe failed to mention that the mushrooms would shrink about 30% (so don’t stuff too full) and all of that shrinkage is from water, which will end up in the bottom of your pan.
They shoulda mentioned all that. My soggy shrooms made me very sad, especially after all the time they take to put together.
I always cook stuffed mushroom caps very hot to cook them before the juices all come out, and I pull them out as soon as they appear done before they’ve shrunk too much. Also, if you are washing the mushrooms in water to clean them first, don’t - just wipe them clean. They absorb some of the water. Try making them again; don’t give up!
When I visited Ireland, all of the B&Bs had this wonderful, hearty brown bread-- You could easily make an entire meal of it. One of them handed out the recipe for it to everyone who stayed there. Great, I thought, I can’t wait to make this stuff myself!
Except that all of the measurements were in pints and tablespoons and such, and I couldn’t tell which pints and tablespoons and such they were supposed to be. Are they American units, for the benefit of American tourists? Imperial units? Some sort of mixture of both, possibly including some things the B&B owner didn’t know were different across the Pond? Maybe there are some things I didn’t know varied across the Pond? I made my best guesses on it, but the end result wasn’t fit for anything but feeding to ducks.