This is how you make pudding!!

Making pudding from scratch can seem a bit daunting and complicated. But to make it successfully you just need organization and careful attention for about 9 minutes then you have a delicious treat as a pay off.

My photos are of chocolate pudding because that's what I made recently but all puddings are the same. (Although I have to say, butterscotch is not for beginners.) I have two seperate styles of puddings--a looser one that is just to eat as pudding out of a bowl and a firmer one that is for my pies. You can find very good recipes at MarthaStewart.com, just make sure that there are these ingredients in the recipe: whole milk, cornstarch, egg yolks, butter or chocolate. DO NOT trust a recipe that has any type of canned milk or flour in the recipe. This is what I call a Great Depression Recipe. It's a recipe from a great great grandmother or aunt that was developed during The Depression when things like canned milk and flour were more readily available than cream, cornstarch, egg yolks, butter and chocolate.

Once you have found your recipe, decide if you are going to put it in a pie or keep it as pudding. If you want to put it in a pie replace the whole milk with half and half. I know this is shocking and all of your arteries are hardening right now but it's the facts, milk fats make a firmer pudding. Also add another 1/2 tablespoon of cornstarch. Then get organized. Get your egg yolks seperated and put in one bowl, have your sugar and cornstarch ready to beat into your eggs, have your milk heating up on the stove and your slices of butter ready(if called for).

Once everything is heated up, in my photos above's case the chocolate has melted into the cream, the delicate timing part comes in. Beat the egg yolks and cornstarch/sugar mixture together until they are light in color. Add the warmed choc. milk mixture slowly to the eggs or they will turn into scramble eggs. I'm so paranoid about this that I literally start off ladeling in a couple of tablespoons of hot choc. milk at a time, slowly building up to bigger ladels full once the mixture is like half way full of choc. milk. Transfer the egg and choc. milk mixture back into the original pan and put onto medium low heat and begin to mix manically for the next 6 or 7 minutes. I use a whisk for this because the pudding cooks fastest on the pan's surface so you want to easily scrape off cooking pudding and mix it in so it doesn't cook irregularly and turn chunky.

So as you can see in photos above, the pudding starts off looking like chocolate milk and you will think for a couple of minutes that you might have done something wrong and it will never thicken. But a watched pot does eventually boil, or in this case thicken. It will have tons of bubbles in it and be pretty light in color. Even though it doesn't seem much thicker, you will soon see fewer bubbles and the color will get more chocolaty. Next you'll see traces of your whisk forming when you stir it. Aah ha, it's working! It's thickening! If it seems like it's boiling a lot at this point turn it down a bit. There will be bubbles but it shouldn't be actively boiling. You probably have just about a minute or two before it becomes thick enough to be pudding. Finally it will be totally pudding like but don't take it off until big boils rise up and start exploding on the surface(ewwh, yuck, that reminds me of 7th grade!) But now you're pudding is successfully done.

Take it off of the heat and keep stirring for about a minute. If you are making a pie pour it hot into the pie shell and immediately press saran wrap over the top. You will know it's a true success if you can pull the saran wrap up off of the pudding right away and the pudding doesn't stick to it. But if it does, don't worry, you'll get it next time and it'll taste freakin' awesome anyway.

Good Luck!