Fluffy tapioca pudding
Heidi has this recipe for tapioca pudding sweetened with honey & flavored with rosewater and lemon zest & chopped pistachios on top. It’s in her 2nd book, which I have, rather than her blog, but it’s been shared around. It sounded delicious and exotic and I made it as one of the desserts at the Indian dinner. I was dubious about the part of the instructions that said to mix in the egg yolks with the milk, honey and soaked tapioca pearls and to bring it to a slow boil. The usual pudding method is to cook the milk and thickening – like tapioca or cornstarch – and then stir some of the hot mixture into the egg yolks, and then mix it all together and finish the cooking – so’s the egg yolks don’t curdle. Of course this curdled. So unsatisfactory. And extra so, because tapioca, warm & fluffy, was sick day comfort food when I was a kid, like fried bananas in lots of butter; things my mother made me on those rare days I stayed home from school and needed cosseting. On Sunday I made real fluffy tapioca. Cooked the milk and tapioca together, then blended in the yolks, beaten with the sugar. Whipped the whites and folded those in last. These instructions said to soak the pearls overnight – I only soaked them about an hour. I think they still seemed a little chewy from the too-short soaking, but aside from that, a much more satisfactory tapioca.
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mostly
