If you're on the lookout for a creamy, delicious, vanilla-spiked tapioca pudding recipe, this is it. I came back from Rome and spent the following Sunday down the peninsula at my parent's house looking at old slides and playing around with various tapioca pudding recipes, ingredients, and techniques. It's no secret that I much prefer a silky smooth, chocolate pudding, but I know many of you are like my dad - big-time tapioca pudding fans. This little exercise nearly made be a convert.
My dad is known to be quite generous with his tapioca pudding - my grandma and her 90 year old friends would receive weekly deliveries up until she passed away last year. I can only imagine it makes appearances at his office on a regular basis as well. Over the years he has been known to use various recipes, mixes, and whatnot in his tapioca puddings, but I wanted to zero in on one master recipe to share with you, the quintessential tapioca pudding recipe. We looked at his approach, my aunt weighed in with her recipe, and I introduced some ideas to the mix. What we ended up with was a perfect pudding good enough to make me consider switching from silky smooth to bumps and lumps indefinitely.
Onto the basics. A great batch of tapioca requires equal parts patience, attentiveness, and top-notch ingredients. Like a risotto or polenta there is much stirring involved, and you need to watch the pudding religiously. That being said, broadly speaking, making tapioca is relatively simple. When I asked my dad to articulate the most important, top-level considerations here's what he said:
- Use your thickest-bottomed pot - this will help prevent scorching. Once you've scorched the pudding, that's it - you've ruined it. He uses his Le Crueset dutch oven pot, but surprised me when he said for extra large batches he sometimes deploys the base of his pressure cooker (!?) which is very large, and very heavy. He never pressurizes it, just uses the pot part.
- Pay attention to temperature. You need to bring the tapioca pudding mixture up slowly for a few reasons. To avoid scorching, but also this gives the tapioca balls time to cook as they are coming up to a boil.
- Stir constantly. I have to admit that I get lazy and don't stir the entire time, and if your stove isn't overly hot, this is fine. But my dad likes to stir the whole time.
- Make a double batch - one for you and one to share. The recipe below is for a single batch, but easily doubles.
Before we move onto the recipe itself, here are a few other things I noticed as we cooked our way through various batches. It is important to soak small pearl tapioca before attempting to make pudding with it, or your texture will be off. Some people soak overnight, but we found that 30 minutes or so worked with small tapioca, resulting in a lively textured tapioca with wonderful creamy, custard bridging the beads. Many recipes call for water, I loved the 100% milk version we did, we even soaked the tapioca balls in milk - whole milk for that matter - again going after rich, creaminess. We did one batch with instant tapioca - this comes in a box, and like instant oatmeal the tapioca pieces are much smaller (and in this case also pre-cooked). The universal feeling among everyone who tasted it didn't have anything to do with the actual flavor (which was decent), there was an aversion to the gelatinous texture - maybe coming from the soy lecithin additive? Not sure, but starting from scratch with the small pearl tapioca was the way to go - Bob's Red Mill All Natural Small Pearl Tapioca worked beautifully as a base ingredient. And one last note, I know many people like to do the "fluffy" version of tapioca pudding, where you beat egg whites and fold them in - it is an extra step and I like a denser pudding, so that isn't something I incorporated here.