Another week has gone by… actually FLOWN by is more like it… and it’s time once again for Tuesdays with Dorie :)   This week’s host was Isabelle of the blog Les Gourmandises d’Isa and she chose the Arborrio Rice Pudding recipe. Vanilla… chocolate… or both… so of course I had to make both :)

Done well, rice pudding is a dessert I really like. Every once in a while I’ll order it in a restaurant though I do make it quite often at home.  It’s been another week in which I’ve been crazy busy… and I seriously considered sitting out this week.  But I really like rice pudding!  And the Hubs had never eaten it but being the chocolate lover he is, well, as soon as I said “chocolate”, well, he was in! LOL

The recipe (which can be found on Isabelle’s site) is not a difficult one at all but for some reason it gave me fits. Par-boiling the rice was easy, heating the milk & sugar was easy, combining the par-boiled rice with the milk/sugar was okay too.  But… it was the “simmering” for 30 minutes that just started things downhill.  At 30 minutes, what I had was soup.  Rice soup, sure, but soup nonetheless.  Removing it from the heat and having little faith that my rice soup would miraculously transform itself into rice pudding just by sitting in the chiller for 6 hours, I put it back on the burner and ran to the TwD site P&Q’s section to see if other people had the same experience.  Uh… yup… they did!  Luckily Dorie herself popped in and told us the recipe in the book has a major typo and it’s supposed to be simmer for 55 minutes.  Big difference!

By that time my Arborrio rice pudding had been cooking for 40 minutes so I just added 15 minutes to the time and thought I’d be good to go. Stupid me.  Stupid… stupid… stooooooopid me.  I never set a timer according to the recipe instructions… instead setting it about 2/3 of the time and checking it.  I truly regret not doing that because my Arborrio rice pudding was scorched beyond belief.  The whole inside bottom of my favorite stainless steel saucepan was horribly, horribly scorched :(  

I salvaged the non-burned rice pudding and separated into two ramekins.  To one I added the scraped innards of half of one 6.5″ vanilla bean (for me)… to the other I added just shy of 2 ounces of semi sweet chocolate (for DH).  We let them sit in the chiller for only a little while since we wanted to eat it warm (really the only way I like my rice pudding).  The chocolate one was definitely less creamy – I guess when the chopped chocolate melted it added a bit more liquid which kept it from setting up like the vanilla bean one.  After tasting it I thought it was way way way over the top too chocolaty… but DH thought it was just fine :)  And I’m wondering, is it just me or does my chocolate rice pudding look like a dish of no-bean chili? LOL  Seriously!  I think it does!

In my final analysis I think this recipe tasted just meh.  Nothing special, nothing terrible, just okay.  I’ll save my arborrio rice for making risotto and stick to my tried and true method for making rice pudding…. leftover rice (a day or two old is best), milk, vanilla, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and golden raisins. Oh yeah, that’ll do it for me ev-ree time :)

As for my scorched saucepan, I was afraid it was a lost cause.  I soaked it… I boiled water in it… I scrubbed it… I was about ready to toss it out… and then DH spent a considerable amount of time scrubbing the heck out of it using a bbq-grill cleaning pad and Comet Liquid.  Amazingly, somehow he got it clean.  YAY DH!!

Please check out the rest of the TwD bakers to see how their rice pudding turned out :)

Have a delicious day!

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