8 Treasures and Black Rice: Two Asian Rice Puddings Gourmet

8 Treasures and Black Rice: Two Asian Rice Puddings
Gourmet

Cold weather comes around and we drift into rice pudding mode very quickly. It's comfort food, a nursery sweet. While our first allegiance is to Jane Grigson and Laurie Colwin's lemon rice pudding, we'd like to branch out a bit this year, so these Asian-inspired puddings are looking very appealing.

Both of these recipes are from Gourmet (we're mining their archives like crazy right now; we hope the website doesn't go away any time soon!). The first is called Eight-treasure Pudding, and it's a chewier Asian version of rice pudding with dried fruit and a surprise of red bean paste inside. It looks like a fancied-up version of our nursery comfort food, but a wonderful option for a gluten-free dessert.

The second one is much simpler, but even more exotic. It calls for Chinese black rice or Thai black sticky rice, mixed with just sugar and coconut milk. (So this is not only gluten-free, but vegan as well!) It sounds sublime and quite easy, so we'll be making this as soon as we can find some black rice.

• Eight-treasure Puddings at Gourmet
• Black Rice Pudding at Epicurious

Have you ever tried one of these two puddings or a similar Asian-inspired rice pudding?

Related: Recipe: Lemon Rice Pudding

(Images: Mikkel Vang; Romulo Yanes)

Comments (3)

I made chocolate forbidden rice pudding, and it was kind of a failure (link is relevant and not just self-linking, I promise). The forbidden rice was too tough to create that nice soft rice pudding mouth-feel. I would not recommend it. But maybe it's a matter of expectations. If you're thinking of it like a hard barley or wheatberry kind of grain, then you will not be disappointed.

posted by GreenCayennes on November 9th 2009 at 11:00am
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Eight-treasure rice pudding is a special treat in Chinese cooking, and usually something you go out for. I just ate a canned version on the weekend, which was very sad.

posted by Michelle of Montreal on November 9th 2009 at 12:16pm
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Black rice and coconut milk--how come I never thought of that? I'm pulling out my pressure cooker right now.

posted by Onepot on November 9th 2009 at 7:32pm
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