Tonight I had a craving for rice pudding. Normally we make it out of leftover cooked rice, but we (a) didn't have any leftover cooked rice; and (b) didn't have any of the uncooked rice that we'd normally use.
We did, however, have an untouched bag of arborio rice that I picked up a while back with the intention of learning to make risotto. Risotto plans never came to fruition, but I reckoned it'd probably be a good rice pudding rice.
Of course I have no idea what sort of proportions one would use to cook arborio without using the risotto technique, so I figured I'd look up a recipe for it. I ended up finding a recipe for the full rice pudding!
It was delicious.
Arborio Rice Pudding
- 1/2 cup arborio rice
- 4 cups milk
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract or 1/2 vanilla bean
- 1/4 tsp almond extract
- fresh, frozen, or dried fruit (optional)
Put the rice, milk, sugar, and vanilla in a large saucepan and bring slowly to a gentle boil. Reduce heat and simmer until pudding thickens and rice becomes soft. Add almond extract and fruit. Cool and serve.
I opted for some frozen blueberries, and they turned the pudding a delightful lilac purple color. I also thought that the amount of almond extract the original recipe called for would have been quite a bit too almondy, so I cut back on that.
