TWD - arborio rice pudding

This week’s TWD recipe is Arborio rice pudding and is chosen by Isabelle of Les Gourmandises d’isa. I love rice pudding, although it is only latterly that I have come to enjoy it. My earliest memory of rice pudding is my Grandma making it and it having that horrible “skin” on top. I hate that kind of thing, although I know some people like it.

Dorie’s rice pudding recipe uses Arborio rice – the short grain rice usually used for making risotto. I have used Arborio rice to make rice pudding before. You do need to use short grain rice as it gives a much creamier result – it must be a bit more starchy than long grain rice. Dorie’s recipe par-boiled the rice before adding it to the hot milk. Dorie specified full cream milk for the pudding, but I used calci-trim (a calcium fortified low fat milk) with success. Even using full fat milk, rice pudding is a fairly low fat and relatively healthy pudding as the amount of sugar used is minimal and the only fat is in the milk.



Dorie suggested flavouring the rice pudding with vanilla or with chocolate, or splitting the pudding and doing half chocolate and half vanilla. I have always wanted to make chocolate rice pudding, but for some reason have never got round to it, so I went the half and half way. I used vanilla paste to flavour my vanilla half and I love the little flecks of vanilla you can see through the pudding. I actually didn’t really like the chocolate pudding. I found it a bit too rich (there aren’t very many things I can say that about!), so I am pleased that I tried both. I had read that many TWDers had found that there was too much milk in the recipe, so even though I made a half batch, I kept the full amount of rice and I found that worked well.

I thought this was delicious – see if the other TWDers thought so here and check out the recipe on Isabelle’s blog.