Skip to content
whisksweetly
Home Recipes About Contact

By course

By method

Old-Fashioned Rice Pudding

Stovetop, stirred, and finished with egg yolks off the heat. Loose when it comes off, set by the time it reaches the table.

Prep
5 min
Cook
45 min
Makes
Serves 6
Jump to the recipe
Rice pudding with cherry sauce and fresh berries
Photo: Gundula Vogel / Pexels

Baked rice pudding and stovetop rice pudding are different desserts with the same name. The baked one sets into something sliceable with a skin on top. This is the other one: loose, spoonable, custard-thickened, the sort served warm in a bowl.

Short-grain rice, and this is not negotiable. Pudding rice or arborio release amylopectin as they cook, and that starch is what makes the liquid around the grains thick and glossy. Long-grain rice is bred to do the opposite — to stay separate — so it gives you rice sitting in milk.

The egg yolks go in at the end, off the heat, and this is the step that goes wrong. Yolks set at around 70°C; a simmering pan is at 95°C. Tip them straight in and you get sweet scrambled egg in seconds. Temper them instead: whisk a ladleful of the hot milk into the yolks first, which raises them gently, then return the mixture to the pan with the heat off entirely. Homemade eggnog is the same technique at a slightly higher temperature.

It thickens substantially as it cools. Take it off the heat while it still looks too loose — if it is right in the pan, it will be stiff in the bowl.

Rice pudding topped with redcurrants and cinnamon sugar
Photo: TLink / Pixabay

Creamy rice pudding, printed

Stovetop, stirred, and finished with egg yolks off the heat. Loose when it comes off, set by the time it reaches the table.

Six things

  • ¾ cup (150 g) short-grain pudding rice
  • 1 liter (4 cups) whole milk
  • ½ cup (100 g) superfine sugar
  • 1 vanilla pod, split, or 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • Pinch of fine salt
  • 2 egg yolks
  • ¼ cup (60 ml) heavy cream
  • Ground cinnamon and nutmeg, to serve

Simmering, then tempering the yolks

  1. 1 Put the rice, milk, sugar, vanilla and salt in a heavy saucepan. Bring to a bare simmer over medium heat, stirring.
  2. 2 Drop the heat to low and cook 35–40 minutes, stirring every few minutes and scraping the base — milk catches and burns there before anywhere else. The rice should be soft and the liquid thickened.
  3. 3 Whisk the yolks and cream together in a bowl.
  4. 4 Take the pan off the heat. Whisk a ladleful of the hot rice mixture into the yolks, then a second, then pour it all back into the pan and stir. The residual heat sets it; the burner stays off.
  5. 5 Leave 10 minutes to thicken, then serve warm with cinnamon and nutmeg.

Reheating, and raisins

  • Refrigerated, it sets firm. Loosen it with a splash of milk and warm it gently.
  • Raisins, if you want them, go in for the last 10 minutes so they plump without dissolving.

Two ways creamy rice pudding goes wrong

The yolks went in too hot or too fast. Temper them with two ladlefuls of hot liquid first and add them with the pan off the heat, not simmering.

It will cook, but it will not thicken. Long-grain rice is specifically bred to release less starch, and that starch is the entire mechanism here.