Two recipes, five or six ingredients.

I love chocolate pudding. With my new stove needing testing and my good pots and pans finally unpacked, I’ve decided to use chocolate pudding for experimentation. The trick was to find recipes with ingredients I had at home.

Why make pudding from scratch? Well, why not? It’s all about knowing exactly what the ingredients are. Neither of these recipes are much more difficult than cooking pudding from a box, but there are no mystery ingredients. Best of all, you can fine-tune the recipe you prefer to change the sweetness, thickness, and darkness of the chocolate.

The Cornstarch Version

The other day, I made a chocolate pudding recipe I found online. Like most pudding recipes, it used cornstarch as a thickener. It had just five ingredients and looked pretty simple, so I gave it a go.

Ingredients

• 2 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 3 tbsp cornstarch
• 2 cups nonfat milk
• 1 tsp vanilla extract

Preparation

1. In a saucepan, combine the dry ingredients.
2. Stir the milk in slowly until smooth.
3. Cook on medium heat, stirring continuously, for 3 or 4 minutes.
4. Stir in the vanilla.
5. Pour the hot pudding into 4 individual serving bowls.
6. Serve warm or chill at least 2 hours to set.

It was good, but not as good as I’d hoped. I thought I’d try another one.

The Flour Version

Years ago, when I was seriously into cooking, I used to make chocolate pudding from scratch. I found the recipe in my original Fanny Farmer Cookbook, which I replaced for some reason years later. The recipe I used for chocolate pudding was gone. This evening, I went searching for a recipe using the search phrase “chocolate pudding w/cocoa and flour.” I came up with a bunch of options, but the one I tried was on Cooks.com, mostly because I didn’t want to scald milk or put eggs in my chocolate pudding.

I made the recipe exactly as written. I was disappointed. It was way too sweet and the “almost heaping” measurements were a bit too vague for my taste. So I rewrote it.

Ingredients

• 2 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
• 3 tbsp flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 cups nonfat milk
• 1 tbsp. butter
• 1 tsp. vanilla

Preparation

1. In a saucepan, combine the dry ingredients.
2. Stir the milk in slowly until smooth.
3. Cook on medium-low heat until pudding thickens.
4. Stir in the vanilla and butter.
5. Pour the hot pudding into 4 individual serving bowls.
6. Serve warm or chill at least 2 hours to set.

As you can see, the preparation is almost identical. The flavor is different. It could be the butter — which I’m not convinced is needed. Just seems to make it richer. I like this version better.

If you try either one, let me know what you think.