Wow, was what I said.

Coconut Milk Pudding with Mexican Piloncillo Syrup

I came across an incredibly easy and fast recipe for custard pudding on a Japanese food blog, and tried it yesterday. According to the recipe, it required one of those fancy Le Creuset pots, which have become a huge fad in Japan in the four years I've been absent from that country. Born rebellious, however, I haven''t felt too eager to jump on that bandwagon (although I'm quite fond of the cute shapes and vivid colors of these pots and pans), so I don't own one. The recipe was to boil some water in a Le Creuset pot, place small cups of custard pudding in the boiling water, keep the pot boiling for 3 minutes and leave it alone for 20 minutes with the lid on. The high heat-retention rate of the Le Creuset would allow the pudding to cook gently at the right temperature, which prevents formation of texture-roughening steam bubbles. So, the pot only needs to be heat-retentive, I thought. I gave my non-stick pasta pot a try. And it worked fantastic.

Since I figured my pot would lose more heat more quickly than the fantabulous Le Creuset, I extended the boiling time to 5 minutes, and left the pot (and the pudding) alone for 20. After a few hours of cooling in the fridge, my pudding came out fantastic. The texture was rich smooth, the flavor largely intact (probably thanks to the shorter cooking time), and contrary to my instinct, it was cooked through. (As a comparison, it normally takes more than 45 minutes in an oven for a pudding to cook.) I didn't have to tinker with the oven temperature during cooking, and I didn't have to do the cumbersome bake-bath thing (where you place pudding cups in a vat filled with hot water, which can spill all over your tender feet). Except for the hassle of carefully lowering the small cups into the boiling water with my clumsy (and trembling) hands without burning my wrists at the edge of the pot, the method was amazingly easy and yet the result was amazingly good. And I'm guessing that this method should work with most pudding recipes with minor tinkering of boiling and resting time.

The only thing I had to be careful about was the water level. Since I had three different kinds of cups, I had to remove some of the boiling water so that the boiling water won't get into any of them. Some water did end up getting into the shortest cup, and that made the surface pretty rough (which is why the photographed pudding has whipped cream and Mexican cane sugar syrup on top to cover up the blemished face). But beneath the surface, the pudding was fine. I'm mind-boggled by the ease and quickness of this recipe, and am definitely be making more puddings according to this, if only to show the Le-Creuset-equipped little madams of Japan. Ha!