The consistency is off-pudding

June 14, 2016 2:42 PM

I had a momentary craving, so I made a batch of chocolate pudding. Oh right, I hate pudding's texture and consistency. The flavor is delicious though. What do I do with all this pudding?

I don't have much of a sweet tooth--although I love chocolate--and I have a pretty strong aversion to gelatinous, jiggly, homogenous foodstuffs. I honestly can't tell you why I settled on making pudding, other than it sounded expedient and tasty in the moment. Now the kitchen smells like heaven but I have a saucepan full of about 6 cups of something so jiggly that even the sight of it gives me a little gag. What do you gifted chefs make out of excess pudding? I'll try making some of the batch into frozen pudding pops, but beyond that I'm stumped.

Relevant details:

-The pudding is cornstarch-based, from this wee cookbook (ingredients are cocoa, sugar, salt, cornstarch, almond milk, vanilla, margarine).

-I follow a very low fat vegan diet for a medical reason (I have Crohn's, refined fats and oils are my most reliable triggers, especially fats and oils of animal origin). There's a quarter teaspoon of margarine in the entire 6-8 servings of pudding. I'm especially interested in pudding-remediation recipes that aren't based on eggs, butter, margarine, and all the other things that omnivores tend to love in desserts. Still, I'm happy to hear your ideas even if they're oily and buttery and made of lard--I'm good at adapting recipes and if the answer is to make a decadent cake that's so rich I can only eat two grams of it per day, so be it.

I eagerly await your pudding repurposing wisdom!

posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel to Food & Drink (18 answers total)

It can be frozen! Try it as popsicles. Or, freeze it, then blend it, and eat it like a custard or ice cream.
posted by Mo Nickels at 2:49 PM on June 14, 2016 [14 favorites]

Put something crunchy in it! Ideas:
- Granola?
- Grape nuts or cheerios or some other breakfast cereal
- Crushed roasted peanuts or other nut (or seed)
- Broken-up graham crackers
- Cut up fruit (apples or something if you want crunchy, but non-crunchy fruit would probably work too)

I do this with yogurt a lot because i love it but i have similar texture issues with it, and I would think the solutions would often be similar.
posted by brainmouse at 2:49 PM on June 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

You could try it as a spread on toast, like Nutella.
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:51 PM on June 14, 2016

Came in here to mention freezing it as popsicles, and I see that was the first suggestion. Pudding pops are really incredibly delicious: frozen pudding popsicles are essentially homemade fudgesicles.
posted by sleeping bear at 3:00 PM on June 14, 2016 [4 favorites]

You are going to waste more time and ingredients with this one. It's OK to throw it out now.
posted by flourpot at 3:02 PM on June 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Could you thin it with some more almond milk and drink it as a milkshake?

Or maybe put it in a blender with more almond milk and bananas, and make a chocolate banana smoothie? Or strawberries.

Use it instead of coffee creamer?
posted by MexicanYenta at 3:03 PM on June 14, 2016 [10 favorites]

Best answer: Chopped up fruit in pudding is great. Nuts too. Crunched up Rice Chex or other cereal could be lovely.

Or you could come to my house and give me all the pudding. You should probably do that.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:14 PM on June 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Poke cake? If you have a cake or cake-like recipe or mix, make that up, bake it, poke holes in the cake and pour the pudding over the top. It seeps into the cake and makes it moist and delicious. Bonus points for doing a vanilla cake with chocolate pudding on top (it looks pretty!). If you use minimal pudding, you should have just enough seep into the cake itself without too much on top for textural problems.
posted by carrioncomfort at 3:15 PM on June 14, 2016 [3 favorites]

If you ever eat smoothies, you can freeze the pudding into cubes to add to your smoothies like ice.
posted by Lyn Never at 3:22 PM on June 14, 2016 [5 favorites]

I feel like a lot of the suggestions in this thread aren't taking into account how much you truly dislike pudding and I have to agree with flourpot: just throw it out. Even the sight of it makes you gag. I feel similarly about pudding and I don't think there's any rescuing this.
posted by kate blank at 3:23 PM on June 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

Put it on a crust & make a pie with a nice fruit & nut topping.
Though I'd probably just freeze it into pudding pops.
posted by wwax at 3:24 PM on June 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Sounds like an excuse to invite some friends over.
posted by aniola at 3:40 PM on June 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Do you have an ice cream maker? If so, use it! It will be creamier than pudding pops. If you don't, post a request on facebook. One of your friends will and you can share the results.
posted by myselfasme at 3:40 PM on June 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Best answer: This happened to me about 6 months ago. This is what I did: I mixed the pudding with some almond flour, a little wheat flour (just because I ran out of almond flour) and some baking powder (a teaspoon, maybe? I was pretty much winging it) until it was a little thicker than cake-batter consistency- more spoonable than pourable. Fill muffin cups 1/4-1/3 full, bake at 325-350 until a skewer comes out clean-ish. It will be quite rich and dense and taste like a chocolate-almond flour-less cake. These little cakes are so good I will only make pudding if I can turn it into these little cakes.
posted by dogmom at 7:37 PM on June 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Seconding the ice cream maker suggestion, if you have one handy. Making ice cream out of pudding is kind of magic.
posted by Metroid Baby at 8:05 PM on June 14, 2016

pudding pops or giving me the pudding are the two best ideas
posted by poffin boffin at 9:00 PM on June 14, 2016 [2 favorites]

Trifle? Sponge cake on the bottom of a dish, add some kind of fruit, pudding over the top, then add cream and chopped nuts. Tip some kind of sweet alcohol over the sponge pieces if you want it (sherry is traditional, but you could use any liqueur). One would usually use custard, but I can't see why pudding wouldn't work. The whole point of trifle is that it is slightly thrown together and adaptable.

Given the chocolate flavour I would probably go for a chocolate orange theme (tinned mandarin segments) or some kind of berry (cherry, raspberry, something like that). Or skip the fruit and go with kahlua or Tia Maria. Or make a version of zuppe inglese.
posted by tinkletown at 4:54 AM on June 15, 2016

Response by poster: Thanks all. The frozen pops suggestion was great, but we made a poke cake that turned out weirdly delicious, and mixing in some salty chex mix to a small portion of pudding was very tasty. Many thanks for the suggestions!
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 11:48 AM on June 20, 2016 [2 favorites]