Rice pudding with a burnt sugar top
A skin from the oven, then a crust from the grill
most of it unattended in the oven, plus 10 minutes cooling before the sugar goes on
Doubles in a slightly larger dish with about 15 minutes more in the oven. Keep anything left over covered in the fridge and eat it within two days. The crust is only ever good on the day you make it.
Rice pudding baked slowly develops two things a stovetop version never quite manages: rice cooked properly, fully soft, and a pale gold skin across the top where the cream meets the heat. This version pushes that skin further, under a hot grill with a scatter of sugar, until it cracks like the top of a crème brûlée and gives way to the same soft grains underneath. It wants very little attention, an oven doing the work for the best part of an hour and a half while you do something else entirely. Let the caramel sit for a minute or two once it comes out from under the grill. It holds its heat for far longer than it looks, and the crack across the surface is worth waiting for.
Ingredients
Contains: Milk
- 75 gpudding rice
- 70 gcaster sugar, 40 g for the pudding, 30 g for the brûlée top
- 500 mlwhole milk
- 100 mldouble cream
- 1 tspvanilla extract
- 15 gunsalted butter, cut into small pieces
Method
Heat the oven to 150°C fan (170°C) and butter a small baking dish, about 1 litre.
Put the rice and 40 g of the sugar in the dish and stir in the milk, cream and vanilla extract. Dot the butter pieces over the surface.
Bake uncovered for 20 minutes, then stir once to stop the rice settling in one place. Return to the oven for a further 60 minutes, undisturbed, until the rice is fully soft with no bite left and a pale gold skin has formed on top.
Take the pudding out and leave to cool for 10 minutes. Heat the grill to its highest setting.
The pudding underneath can be baked a day ahead. Cool it, cover it and keep it in the fridge, then let it come back to room temperature and grill the sugar before serving.
Sprinkle the remaining 30 g of sugar evenly over the surface and put the dish under the hot grill for 2 to 3 minutes, watching closely, until the sugar bubbles and turns a deep amber crust.
A cook's blowtorch does the same job with less risk of the rice underneath overcooking, if you have one.
Leave to stand for 2 to 3 minutes before serving, so the crust hardens into something you can crack with a spoon.
Watch-points
- Bake the rice fully soft, with no bite left in any grain, the way this diet asks for every starch.
- The caramelised top is hot enough to burn a tongue straight from under the grill. Give it the full resting time stated before anyone eats it.
Stoma note: A rich, thickening pudding, which is what a high-output stoma wants. Milky and starchy foods like this one are a reliable way to firm up loose output.
Make it more nourishing
- Swap some of the milk for cream, about 250 ml cream to 350 ml milk, for a far richer pudding.
- Stir 2 tbsp of skimmed milk powder into the milk before it goes into the dish. You will not taste it and it lifts the protein.
- Serve with a spoonful of thick mascarpone melting into the warm pudding alongside the crust.
Swaps
- Instead of caster sugar for the top, use demerara sugar
- it caramelises to a deeper, slightly crunchier crust
- Instead of double cream, use extra whole milk
- a lighter pudding, though the finished texture is a little less silky