Yet another Food Flop

[indigo_rose99]

I had a craving last week.  As is usual with food craving, just buying the sweet item will only make me feel lousy after I eat the corn syrup and sugar.  So, I searched for recipes I could modify into something me-friendly.  I was looking for a recipe made from real food -- no mixes, no cool whip.  I really wanted something that actually had me making the cookies, but I was willing to compromise on that. 

I ended up with

Banana Pudding with vanilla wafers

INGREDIENTS:

    * 1/4 cup butter
    * 1 1/2 cups firmly packed brown sugar (used agave nectar)
    * 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
    * dash of salt
    * 1 (13 oz. ) can evaporated milk
    * 3/4 cup water (skipped)
    * 3 eggs, at room temperature, separated
    * 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
    * vanilla wafers (could sub graham crackers or lemon cookies)
    * 3 to 4 bananas
    * 2 tablespoons sugar

PREPARATION:
Melt butter in top of a double boiler over simmering water; stir in brown sugar, flour and salt. Gradually stir in milk and water; cook until thickened, stirring constantly (about 15 to 20 minutes). Beat egg yolks until thick and lemon colored. Quickly stir some of hot mixture into yolks; add to remaining hot mixture, stirring constantly. Cook 2 minutes longer or until thickened. Remove from heat, and stir in vanilla. Cool. Line bottom and sides of a lightly greased 1 3/4-quart casserole with vanilla wafers. Slice bananas to cover bottom layer; top with half of pudding. Layer with more vanilla wafers, remaining banana slices and remaining pudding. Beat egg whites until soft peaks form; gradually beating in 2 tablespoons sugar until stiff peaks form. Spread over pudding. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 minutes or until top is brown.

The cookies were fine.  The bananas were fine.  The meringue was perfect.  

The problem was the pudding.  It never thickened.  It never even gave a hint of thickening.  And, like most recipes, this one didn't give any hints as to what parts of the recipe are flexible and what is critical.  I hate that.

For example, in my mother's panetone recipe, a lot of it is completely flexible.  In fact, I've changed most of the ingredients at one time or another.  But experience with the recipe has taught me that the one thing in the recipe that is completely critical is the rising part.  The dough must rise.  Do whatever it takes to make it rise.  Whatever It Takes.  Days.  Waiting.  Sitting the pan in a rotating sink of warm water.  Turning on the oven and sitting the pan of dough on top of the stove.  Whatever It Takes.  If it doesn't rise, there is no point in baking it.   Mom's recipe doesn't actually say that.  I learned it from watching her.  Ok, and being too impatient to wait and thus ending up with bricks.

I wish all recipes had Dummy's Notes.  You know, a sentence or two in the Banana Pudding recipe that said something like "If the hot mixture does not thicken and does not strongly resemble pudding after 15 minutes of cooling, dump it in the trash and start over."  Or, "If your pudding still resembles colored water after 30 minutes of stirring briskly, add ********." 

I'm convinced if I had a better grasp of chemistry that I would understand what element did not work.  Was it that I used agave nectar instead of brown sugar?  Was it that I skipped the water?  Was it that I stirred up the egg yolks too soon and then waited before adding them?  Was I supposed to keep waiting and stirring until it thickened?  I waited for 25 minutes! How do I know if it is hopeless or a little more of something will fix it all?

Comments

[aurienne.livejournal.com]

America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Illustrated -- they explain the science of everything they do, and the test kitchen (tv show, on PBS and DVDs) has great closeups of how things should look at different stages. (My husband's way into the science of cooking). The recipes and short explanations used to be available for free on a blog I read, but as of 3 days ago, they've been taken down).

I will research the pudding issue in our Cook's Illustrated and my husband's newest book: On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee. That book explains the details of foods and why they're acting the way they do, like about the cell wall structures in the veggie parts and their reaction to heat and salt and various chemical combinations. But Cook's Illustrated starts _every_ recipe by explaining what they tried and why, and how they altered various variables, and what the results were, so why they made the choices they did in the final recipe. It sounds like it may be a good fit for you.

[indigo-rose99.livejournal.com]

This sounds like EXACTLY the kind of resource I would really like. Doing a search to see if I can DVR any episodes...

Please do let me know if your research turns up any hints.

[ironkite.livejournal.com]

Aurienne's taller half here.
It's on PBS with reruns on Create. Not snobby Food Network. You'll need a DVR to run back and forth to get all the ingredients, they can be rather fast sometimes.

It's nice to have a cooking show that cooks 80 or so batches of food sometimes to get the right one. And it's about the food, not some made for TV personality.
http://slate.com/id/2089461/ Best article about the show.

Aurienne has left a reminder for me to have her look up puddings for you. Working on it!!

Rose Levy Berenbaum also does this

[sclatter.livejournal.com]

She wrote the Cake Bible, the Pie and Pastry Bible, I think there's a Bread Bible now, and there's one called Rose's Celebrations I use a good bit. Every recipe has a little sidebar entitled "Understanding". In the Cake Bible she also has a section with just formulas for cakes so you can adapt them. (This is the book I used when making my wedding cake)

But yeah, I suspect the brown sugar is integral to the thickening. It must be kind of caramelizing. The flour should do something, but it wouldn't be enough to thicken that volume on it's own. I guess in your situation you have to determine if the sugar is structural or just for sweetening. In this case I'd say it's structural. In any case, this kind of custard type thing is always straight up tricky.

Don't they make sugar-free pudding mix?

In my experience, if something doesn't thicken when it says it's supposed to, you're always screwed. And if you are sitting there thinking, hmm, has that thickened or not?, it hasn't. :-/

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

I think your thickener was flour. I would have tried mixing a little extra flour with some water to keep it from clumping and then adding that to the pudding (this works for corn-starch-thickening recipes, anyway), and if the flour-water mixture got all gloppy, I would instead have tried sprinkling extra flour directly into the pudding while stirring (with my wire whisk).

I have two pudding recipes I have used successfully (every time). My chocolate pudding recipe has less sugar, less butter, more liquid (2 cups milk) and the same amount of flour as yours has corn starch.

But my vanilla custard has less than half of everything and requires either 2 tablespoons of flour or 1 tablespoon of corn starch.

I think maybe your recipe needs twice as much flour to work. Stupid recipe!

Also, holy moly, that's a lot of butter.

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

Also I just read that when you substitute agave nectar for sugar, you might have to reduce some of the other liquids.

[indigo-rose99.livejournal.com]

I actually tried to take that part into account by skipping the water in the recipe. That part actually makes sense to me.

Perhaps I just need to find a stupid vanilla pudding recipe and make that completely separately.