Home › Doughnuts › Tapioca Pudding
Tapioca Pudding
1/2 cup pearl tapioca or 3 tablespoons minute tapioca 1 quart milk 1 teaspoon melted butter 6 tablespoons sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 1 teaspoon flavoring Soak tapioca in cold water to cover one hour; drain; add milk and butter, and cook in double boiler until tapioca is transparent. Add sugar and salt to beaten eggs and combine by pouring hot mixture slowly on eggs. Return to double boiler and cook until thick. Add flavoring and serve hot or cold with cream.
A stirred tapioca custard rather than a baked pudding. The hinge is the egg step: the custard must thicken over water without approaching a simmer, or it will scramble into threads.
- Pearl vs. minute tapiocaPearl tapioca is the whole dried starch bead and genuinely needs the hour-long cold soak and long cooking. Minute (quick-cooking) tapioca is precooked and granulated " skip the soak and stir it straight into the milk.
- Small pearl onlyThe large pearls now sold for bubble tea will not soften properly in milk at custard temperature. Look for small pearl tapioca, roughly the size of a peppercorn or less.
- Double boilerKeep the water at a bare simmer and do not let the bowl touch it. A heatproof bowl over a saucepan works as well as a purpose-made double boiler.
- TemperingPouring the hot milk slowly onto the beaten eggs while whisking is the whole technique. Reverse the order and the eggs set on contact.
- When it is thick enoughCook only until the custard coats the back of a spoon and holds a line drawn with a finger " about 170"180F. It thickens further as it cools.
- The milkA quart of whole milk is intended. Skim milk gives a thin, watery set.
- FlavoringProbably vanilla extract; lemon extract, or a strip of lemon peel steeped in the milk, was also used. Add it off the heat so it does not cook off.
- YieldA quart of milk makes six to eight servings. Chilled, it wants a skin-preventing layer of plastic film pressed to the surface.
Tapioca is the washed starch of the cassava root, a South American plant carried by Portuguese traders to Asia and Africa, and it reached North American kitchens in the nineteenth century as a cheap, keepable thickener sold in hard white pearls. Puddings like this one " milk, eggs, sugar and a starch, cooked in a double boiler " were the everyday sweet of American home cookery before refrigeration made iced desserts routine. The recipe's offer of "3 tablespoons minute tapioca" as an alternative reflects a period when quick-cooking tapioca, on the American market from the 1890s, had become a branded pantry staple, and cookbooks had to accommodate both the old pearls and the new granules in a single line of ingredients.