Quick & Easy Homemade Chocolate Pudding
We’ve been on a chocolate pudding kick around here. A few weeks ago, as I was reorganizing the pantry, I found a box of instant chocolate pudding at the back of a shelf, so I made it for dessert. L was basically in seventh heaven, and E and I both remarked on how we hadn’t had pudding in a long time – years and years, in fact. There followed an ongoing monologue about the possibilities surrounding “pudding skin,” a la Seinfeld (E can connect just about anything to an episode of Seinfeld).
A few nights later, after the instant pudding was long gone, E said to me hopefully, “There isn’t any more pudding in the pantry, is there?”
I thought for a moment.
“No,” I said. “But it shouldn’t be that difficult to make some from scratch. I’ve made plenty of lemon meringue pies, and the filling in those is essentially a cooked pudding made with cornstarch. It’s probably the same principle: milk and cornstarch.”
And just like that, I went rummaging through cookbooks, hunting recipes for chocolate pudding, and found I was right: pudding is pretty straightforward. Since that night, I’ve probably made chocolate pudding, oh, nine or ten times. I’ve fiddled around until I’ve settled on the right sugar-to-chocolate ratio for us. We like our pudding to have an intense chocolate flavor, almost as intense as a chocolate mousse, but not so much sugar that it’s sickly sweet.
So basically, we’ve become chocolate pudding aficionados in a matter of mere weeks. Yes, it would be easy to just buy instant pudding in a box and whip it up in the mixer with some milk, but as you know, I generally think that homemade tastes better than store-bought (and is better for you, without all the preservatives and other things they put into processed food) and often, the time it takes to make something from scratch isn’t much more than the time it takes to prepare a boxed mix. That holds true in this case. Homemade pudding is incredibly quick – it honestly only takes about five minutes. And since I always have a supply of dark chocolate in the house, I always have the ingredients on hand.
I use chocolate that’s 70% cacao because it’s less sweet; you could use chocolate chips, but you may then want to reduce the sugar to 1/4 cup. You can use 2% milk, but you’ll get a result that’s slightly less creamy. Half and half, on the other hand, will yield a much more decadent pudding. If you’ve never made homemade pudding, I encourage you to give this recipe a try, and then adjust the type and amount of chocolate, sugar, and milk to your family’s liking.
This is probably the simplest homemade dessert you can throw together on a weeknight (or any time, for that matter) and please everyone in the house (everyone who likes chocolate, that is). I don’t think you’ll go back to the box once you see how fast and easy it is, not to mention how delicious.
Quick & Easy Homemade Chocolate Pudding
2-1/2 cups whole milk
3 tablespoons corn starch
1/3 cup sugar (I use organic evaporated cane juice)
1/8 teaspoon kosher or fine grain sea salt
2 ounces dark (70% cacao) or bittersweet chocolate, broken into small pieces
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
In a small bowl, whisk together 1/2 cup of the milk and the cornstarch. Set aside.
Over low heat, bring the remaining 2 cups of milk, sugar, and salt to a simmer. Do not allow to boil!
Whisk in the milk and cornstarch mixture, and continue to whisk until thickened.
Whisk in the chocolate until fully melted and combined.
Remove from heat and whisk in the vanilla.
Ladle into four ramekins or dessert bowls. Cover with plastic wrap and chill until cooled and set.
Serves four.
Here’s the printable recipe. Enjoy!
