Red Fusion's Journal

I've been meaning to participate in Is My Blog Burning?, a periodic themed day for food blogs, for awhile now -- it always catches me by surprise, and I'm not ready for it. This time, I saw it after I'd already started a turkey pot pie for the day, but I saw Cooking With Amy's entry -- coconut rice pudding -- and decided to follow her lead, adapting the idea to what I had in the house.

Coconut Rice Pudding.

Now, back home, rice pudding is not as big a feature as it is elsewhere: bread pudding and the ubiquitous banana pudding are much more popular. And I've rarely had rice pudding I really, really liked: I tend not to like raisins in it, for starters, and it's usually too milky or too ricey. So I liked the idea of coconut rice pudding, using the richness of coconut to substitute for the richness of dairy.

I'm out of long-grain rice, my rice of choice, right now -- which is why I'm not doing a jambalaya. I've got sushi rice and arborio (risotto) rice; we're waiting until the WKRP trip to replenish our basmati rice supply. And I didn't have any coconut milk, but I did have "cream of coconut," a mysterious blue boxed thing from Goya that I bought at some point because I didn't know what it was. This seemed a good time to find out.

It turns out to be a dry, hard, almost waxy or soap-like bar of coconut, which crumbles easily when you start to cut it. I assume it's the coconut cream -- the thick layer that floats to the top of coconut milk -- that's been dried out somewhat. Coconut fat, essentially. It dissolved easily in simmering water, becoming something very much like coconut milk.

I also added some saffron and lime, partly because my initial idea was to do a Persian rice pudding with pistachos and cinnamon (why didn't I? honestly, because I didn't feel like shelling the pistachios), and partly because I've got that free saffron sitting around that I don't use for much.

And why duck egg? Because I have duck eggs, that's why.

So here we go. This makes two medium-sized servings.

1/3 cup arborio rice, uncooked.
5 ounces cream of coconut, dissolved in enough hot water to make 1 1/2 cups.
a couple teaspoons lime juice
a couple threads saffron.
1/4 cup sugar.
1 duck egg yolk; one large chicken yolk is probably a fine substitute, or two small yolks.

Bring rice, coconut, lime juice, and saffron to a simmer. Cover and continue to simmer for 20-25 minutes. Despite turning the flame down as low as it could go, I burned a little bit of the rice at the bottom in the process; I have no idea why, as it wasn't overcooked. You may want to lift the lid after ten minutes to vent some heat.

Turn off heat, add sugar and egg yolk, mix in very well, and cover. Let sit for a couple minutes, then dish and refrigerate for a couple hours, to let the pudding set.

Very coconutty; the lime and saffron are not pronounced, but cut the coconut flavor a little (and the saffron turns the pudding pretty yellow).

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