Well, I'd grade that experiment as about a "C" . . .

[xiphias]

I've been making puddings. (By the American definition of "pudding", which I think, in Great Britain, would be called something like "Bird's". You know, a sort of creamy, sweet non-Newtonian fluid.)

Anyway, I've got a recipe I'm using as a base, which uses sugar, cornstarch, and salt as dry ingredients, to which are added cream, milk, and eggs. With chocolate for chocolate pudding, brown sugar instead of white sugar for butterscotch, and so forth.

Now, what I've been recently doing is figuring that the fat/liquid content of the cream and milk comes out to two cups of water and one-half cup of oil. So, I've been figuring, why not just use water and oil, and emulsify it with the eggs, then use THAT with the dry ingredients?

I've done two things so far, neither of which came out perfectly, but I think I'm getting the idea of it. The first one was olive oil and rosewater, which never got thick enough, because I decided to just use the egg whites instead of using the whole egg, so I think I was too light on the proteins. And tonight's was okay but not perfect. I used a mixture of roasted peanut oil and peanut butter, to make a peanut butter pudding.

Not bad, but the texture was off -- using peanut butter as part of one's oils is always involves a bit of guesswork for me; I've never QUITE figured out the proportions. But it was interesting, at least. And not horrible.

Comments

[linenoise.livejournal.com]

As far as whites instead of whole egg, it's probably not so much the protein content as it is the phospholipids, especially lecithin. A lot of the thickening for something like that is from the emulsification, as much as the protein networks. Egg whites have nearly the same protein content as yolks, but *none* of the fats and emulsifiers.

And dammit, I *still* don't have a food icon on LJ.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

You might find one you like here, perhaps?

http://www.iconarchive.com/category/food-icons.html

[linenoise.livejournal.com]

Oooh! That is a shiny, yes, thank you.