Homemade Chocolate Pudding

You cook the pudding?

When I was about 10 years old my mom told me about my grandmother cooking homemade pudding. Having been from the generation of eating everything instant and out of a box, I was appalled at the thought or cooking something that I always thought of as cold from step one. Flash forward about 20 years and my husband requested a homemade chocolate pie for the holidays like his grandmother used to make. Now I never even met his grandmother before she passed let alone getting any of her recipes!

All he could tell me about the recipe is that it was homemade and not instant pudding. Are you kidding me? As I flashed back to my childhood trauma of the thought of cooking pudding, I gulped and agreed to attempt his “cooked pudding pie”. Well turns out if was amazing! A little to rich for everyday pudding, but not the yucky I had imagined.

The joys of milking a cow (hear me out, it pertains to pudding)

We decided to get a milk cow about six months before the Covid locks downs. Boy were we happy we didn’t have to drive to town milk when everything was so weird. The downside (depending on who you talk to) was that sometimes we had more milk than we knew what to do with. I was bound and determined to not just feed all my extra milk to the pigs and I was just not an experienced enough cheesemaker yet to go though what we were getting from our now two cows.

This is when I came across a recipe for homemade chocolate pudding. I wanted to reduce the sugar a little while keeping the same consistency. So this recipe is an accumulation of several that I found. Its also super yummy will some added flavor with essential oils such as wild orange, lemon, or peppermint.

Getting in the kitchen

Ingredients:

·         1 ¼ cup sugar

·         ¾ cup cocoa (milk, dark, or white)

·         1/3 cup cornstarch

·         4 ½ cups milk (fat free, 1%, 2%, whole, or raw)

·         4 tbs butter

·         1 tsp vanilla

Whipping it up (literally)

Combine all the dry ingredients (sugar, cocoa, and cornstarch) into a medium saucepan and whisk thoroughly. At this time, pour all the cold milk in at once and whisk together before turning the burner on to medium heat. Stir the pudding constantly until it starts to boil while scrapping the sides. This is really important because you don’t want your pudding scorch. Once it starts to boil, continue stirring for 1 minute. It will really start to thicken at this point so its important to make sure that you aren’t letting it get lumpy. You want it super smooth.

After one minute of boiling, remove saucepan from heat and add the vanilla, butter, and if any flavorings are being added do it at this time. Keep stirring until blended and then stir periodically until pudding has cooled to avoid a film forming. Now transfer the pudding whatever container you would like however, I will do either one large bowl, several small serving bowls or popsicle molds. The trick to not getting a film on top of the pudding is to take a piece of plastic wrap and place it over the pudding and press down to where it’s touching the top and is airtight.

Let the pudding chill for a couple hours or overnight and serve.

Check out the full video here!