Masala chai spice themed rice pudding

You might think this topic makes no sense, that it's not even close to being a tea, unless I made it with tea as an ingredient, but I didn't.  That might've worked.  It's not so different than anything including cinnamon and ginger being marketed as "pumpkin spice" related back in the US, but that typically happens in the fall.

I could accept that critique.  This post isn't at all about tea, even though it appears in a tea-themed blog.  It is vaguely related, and I feel like communicating how a masala chai themed rice pudding worked out after making one, and writing about cooking instead, so here it is.

from really making masala chai, in this post

What would the difference be if it were pumpkin pie spice related?  The two sets of spices overlap so much and can vary enough that per my understanding there isn't much difference (which you can check in this first venture into food writing, a post about making a pumpkin pie from scratch).


I made this rice pudding with cinnamon, cardamom, clove, and vanilla.  Ginger would've been ok,  standard for both spice theme sets, but it seemed like clove covered some related flavor-role space, only better for this dish.  Cardamom stood in place of the nutmeg used in pumpkin pies.


Masala chai can include black pepper too, and often enough star anise, but often enough not too.  I only like star anise in savory soups or else it seems like too much for me, with too strong an aftertaste.  That limits it in my cooking to the role it plays in Chinese five spice blends and Vietnamese Pho.


With that context out of the way I'll move on to discussing making this rice pudding version, after some background.

before cooking, the mix

The background, cooking history and philosophy

My Mom made rice pudding, a favorite desert as a child.  That version would've probably used only cinnamon and nutmeg for spicing, besides vanilla.  She slow-cooked it in a crock pot.  It was made based on a standard recipe, using the same ingredients in the same proportion every time, the way normal people prepare foods.

I stopped using recipes in my early 20s, and cooked enough to overcome the missteps that resulted from that.  I guess the idea was to explore cooking by feel, to learn from mistakes, and to experience balancing the inputs more directly, by tasting and adjusting.  It usually worked out, and when it didn't the next version after almost always did.  I cooked everything I could think of:  meats prepared a broad range of ways, traditional American foods, barbecue, soups, or region-specific foods like Cajun, Mexican, and Italian, expanding into doing a lot of baking.  That ranged into ventures as aggressive as making croissants and danishes from scratch, one place I ran into my limitations.  Cakes, pies, tarts, puddings and custards are easy; finely layered forms of pastry not so much.

Rice pudding is easy, you just need to avoid screwing up the proportions.  That's what would happen if someone tried to make it for the first time without any reference to a recipe.  Lets take a look at one, although it's not my Mom's, which I've lost track of.

Old-fashioned Rice Pudding

This recipe was referenced as a Quora answer as the 1975 Betty Crocker version (so it's quite classic):


2/3 cup uncooked regular rice

1 1/3 cups water
2 eggs or 4 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla or 1 tablespoon grated orange peel
2 cups milk
1/2 cup raisins
Nutmeg


Stir together rice and water in saucepan. Heat to boiling, stirring once or twice. Reduce heat; cover and simmer 14 minutes without removing cover or stirring. All water should be absorbed.


Heat oven to 325°. Beat eggs in ungreased 1 1/2-quart casserole. Stir in sugar, salt, vanilla, milk, hot rice and the raisins. Sprinkle with nutmeg. Bake, stirring occasionally, until knife inserted halfway between edge and center comes out clean, 50 to 60 minutes.


All that really would work.  They don't mention cinnamon at all; kind of strange.  Vanilla seems more appropriate than orange peel, to me, but I guess it could be a matter of taste.  Lets move on to what I just made instead.

A masala chai spice version

I used about 3 cups of cooked rice, and probably around 2 1/2 cups of milk (a lot--too little and the pudding turns out too dense, since even cooked rice will soak up liquid, and the dish is basically a custard).  I added 5 relatively small eggs, a size that just wouldn't come up back in the US, where almost every egg seems to be large.  I'd guess that would be similar to three of those.

palm sugar (credit)

I didn't measure the sugar, and used palm sugar instead, which comes in disks (strange, right?).  I've botched some dishes getting a feel for how those equate to granulated sugar.  I tasted the mixture for sweetness--with raw eggs in it, just madness--and added a bit of granulated sugar at the end to adjust it.  Salt is a critical ingredient, getting the right amount, so little that you barely taste it but enough that is still balances the rest, just as for masala chai.  I added about half a teaspoon.


I can't estimate how much cinnamon, cardamom (ground black pod type), and ground clove I added; some, a good bit, adjusting by tasting after.  Nutmeg really would also work well, and someone else might like ground or even fresh ginger in it, but I'd rather have clove and cardamom fill that range.  Beyond that I added a bit of vanilla (imitation liquid version, maybe two tablespoons), and skipped the raisins, since my Mom didn't add those.  Mashed banana might be nice to add fruit tone but it doesn't match this theme.

I baked it at around 350 for over an hour, starting even hotter initially to speed up heating.  We use Celcius here (in Thailand), so really 200, but then we have a large size version of a toaster oven and temperatures work out differently in those.  Thais tend to not bake; ovens aren't standard.  Slow cooking in a crock pot works really well, we just don't have one.

cooked version; browning the top is optional, but would dress it up

The verdict

It was awesome.  It might seem like splitting spicing input between cinnamon and nutmeg would make roughly the same desert but going heavy on cardamom and adding a good bit of clove for higher end gave it a spice effect you could almost feel more than taste.  I don't mean in the same way spicy Thai food hits your sense of taste like a hammer, or more like a comet-strike if that goes badly, or how Indian food changes your metabolism and the spicing sweats back out of you.  I mean it was tasty in a way that's hard to completely get your sense of taste around; the effect was deeply catchy.

served warm with milk

It would seem natural to add some black tea, wouldn't it?  I'd probably even strongly brew two types of black tea and add both, to give it more complexity.  But I'm not really a "cooking with tea" type of person.  I drink a truly insane amount of tea, maybe only equivalent to a half dozen large cups a day, or 20 small ones, or a mix of sizes, but the number of types really adds up.  I like matcha soft serve ice cream and pretty much leave it at that.  Tea could combine well with lots of foods but I'd sort of rather that in my own diet it didn't.


If I'd made this dish for other people I'd have tried that, for the sake of novelty as much as flavor balance, and eventually I may.  If adding black tea it would make sense to go ahead and put the ginger back in too, but draw the line at black pepper, to keep it sensible.

baking a pumpkin pie from scratch (not about tea)

This is a clear violation of tea-blog scope, writing about something that has nothing whatsoever to do with tea.  I wanted to write a bit about cooking in a food group I'd been spamming with tea blog links when the two subjects seemed to overlap, and then thought why not break form and write it here.  If I don't post links to it anywhere then it will be a little like it never happened anyway.

So all this is about a very normal thing for me, making a pumpkin pie from scratch.  It's really not worth mentioning how to do it, in a sense, because it's so easy a child could do it, and everyone should already know how, it's just normal food preparation, but I'll run through it anyway.

Japanese pumpkin is orange; brown- green Thai version

To begin, we bought a pumpkin travelling in Isaan, North-East Thailand, on a trip to Khon Kaen.  They kept selling interesting an inexpensive fresh vegetables so we came back with a lot of corn, that pumpkin, a watermelon, and a lot of one type of yam.


The pumpkin is a Japanese pumpkin, different than the type one sees in America or the Thai pumpkin, which looks more like a strange version of a squash, with a green, odd-textured exterior.  Thai pumpkin tastes more like a squash too, with the Japanese style in the middle, not so different than the one you see America, but not the same (on the left in this picture).

Isaan!  Looks like the country anywhere, but a little tropical

I'll keep it simple, just how I made it, resisting the urge to ramble on and on about tangents.

Roast the pumpkin:

Of course, right.  One would cut up the pumpkin into manageable large sections, take out the pulp and the seeds, and keep the skin on, then put the pumkin in a covered pan with water in it for something like 45 minutes to an hour, around 350 or so (but I'm on Celcius here, so 175 C = 350 F).  Really I used around 200, close to 400 F, but it will take the pan and water and pumpkin awhile to reach temp, so it may work well to go with 400 for 20 minutes then back that off to 350 for another half an hour.

roasted pumpkin (slightly less orange)

It's really not a recipe if someone keeps saying "about, roughly," right?  A real recipe can talk you through it, but for me it's best to just wing it a bit, and then fix the glitches next pie.  Betty Crocker can give you more input on measured ingredients, though, and Google must have more on roasting pumpkin.


You know when the pumpkin is ready when it's soft.  If it has a little more texture than you think it should that won't matter, because the pie still needs to cook, but if there's a raw layer near the skin you won't be able to make it work out.  Once the pumpkin is roasted you'll still need to take it out, let it cool a little, then scoop the pumpkin flesh from the skin.  I'm using the skin to eat separately; yesterday I roasted some with butter, and some of that with a yellow curry powder added, broiled at high heat for about 15 minutes in a toaster oven.  For God's sake don't throw it out; think of the nutritional value, must be lots.

another way to roast it

This is a good time to mention I made the whole thing in a large toaster oven.  Thais don't generally have ovens, and we don't (I live in Bangkok).  At a different time in my life I practice baking in a normal small version; you can, but the extra space helps.  It absolutely won't work without a temperature setting, though, so if yours just toasts it's too much of a stretch.  The oven we have isn't like a normal toaster oven, it's a larger version for baking, with two different rack levels and an option to use an extra fan to help distribute the heat differently for some types of cooking.


Ordinarily you wouldn't cover a pie, I mean with foil, and it will throw off the top texture if you do in this case, but I'd at least consider it for a toaster oven because it's just not set up for baking like that.  One really should cover the pumpkin for the roasting step.

Toast the seeds

Maybe optional, but come on, do it.  As a child we made them with just salt added, but this time I added a good bit of oil as well.  It works a lot better with the American version of a pumpkin, with smaller seeds and a thinner seed shell, but the ones I just made are tasty.  I'm not going to be as much help as I should be about temperature and time, and mine went a little extra brown this time, so about three minutes less than I cooked mine would be better.  Just keep an eye on them!  Again maybe 350 would work, maybe only 12 to 15 minutes, but it's easy to check, just eat one.  They should start to tan a little but not get brown.

a little less dark would be as well

Prepping them takes some doing; it takes some meticulous work separating them from the mushy pulp, but that roasting step gives you an hour to mess with.  I'd give them a really good wash too; all that pumpkin mush could throw off the final crispy-skin texture a little.



Salt level is critical, not too much, not too little, but just don't go crazy with it and you'll be fine.  Someone else might think about spicing, doing a curry here too, but for me I like the plain taste.

Make the crust

Easy!  Melt butter to a soft but not liquid state, cut in enough flour so that it gets a bit clumpy, then add water chilled with ice to get it back to a dough consistency.  Ok, so maybe that's not so easy.  My mom used a pastry cutter, hard to describe, it looked like a handle with a half-dozen thick wires making a part that worked like a giant fork.  You can mix it with a fork, or a wooden spoon; I used a metal tablespoon this time.  It only needs a touch of salt, or not if you are using salted butter, but I add a little of whatever spice I feel like, usually cinnamon and something else.  I didn't feel like grinding the sticks and was out of the powder so I did the unthinkable and made this pie without any.  As I recall I put a little nutmeg and ground cardamom in the crust this time.  Vanilla would be nice but if using liquid one would want to be careful about texture.

They advise careful rolling and folding the crust, then some edge fluting, which is a nice approach, but I mashed handfuls of the dough into the pan to give an even depth coating.  Function over form!  Some purist would say I've lost some of the lightness of texture by hand-warming and over-working the dough, and that's right, it's not as flaky as it would have been, but I honestly don't care.  I don't want a light-structured pie crust any more than I want a machine-processed pie-filling consistency; I want it to seem like a person made it, not a machine.

Make the pie filling

Tricky stuff!  Mash the cooked pumpkin, mix in spicing, sugar, spices, eggs, and milk.  Here you might want to check on that link I mentioned for Betty Crocker's version to back me up.  I used four eggs this time, when I'd initially planned to go with three, but the pie was kind of big (non-standard; more on that later), and I decided to use palm sugar disks, and needed to dissolve those in water to work with them, and the mix was a bit thin looking.

They say to use evaporated milk, in that version.  I guess; why not.  Or whole milk really would work, or cream, or half and half.  It's your pie; go with your own instincts, just plan to make another at some point in the future that will turn out even better once you see what works.  Evaporated milk has a nice flavor balance and texture, the right elements for ingredient purposes, but half-and-half would be about the same, and nice that it's a bit less processed.

This is where things gets strange:  I don't measure, anything, ever (ok, maybe for chocolate chip cookies, those things are touchy).  Even stranger:  I would taste the mix to see if it's right, even though it tastes way different when cooked versus raw, and that risks sudden death with raw eggs in it (or maybe not, really).  So for sugar you've got me how much to add, or even what type.  That Betty Crocker version requires a half-cup of white sugar, but really why wouldn't one go with half white and half brown instead.  I used all palm sugar, which is a long story related to how that differs, so hard for me to really say.  So I'll say something that's partly right and perhaps a little wrong; it's closer to a less processed cane sugar.

Spicing:  let's check back in with that "original" recipe, what "pumkin pie spice" really is:

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves


Not bad, for a start.  It's essentially a fruit based custard, so as well to add just a little vanilla as well.  I would also throw in a dash of nutmeg, and ramp up the ginger and clove level a little.  I added cardamom to the version I just made, and as I mentioned I didn't use any cinnamon, but that is crazy.


Next someone might think of how to push this further; fresh vanilla pod would add a lot of flavor, and if someone had easy access to a juicer using a bit of fresh ginger juice instead of a powder would work out better, just good to be careful or the pie would turn out spicy, maybe not in a good way at some level.  Someone that's been making a lot of masala chai might think "why not black pepper?" but that wouldn't cross my mind.  I usually skip it for that tea too, but to each their own.

Bake it

Betty Crocker says to use 425 for 15 minutes and go down to 350 for another 45.  I kept this one in for about an hour close to 400, because it really did take a long time.  For this step I would give the standard recipe a close read to see what they say about checking temperature, and consider the bit they mention about covering a fluted edge with foil to keep it from over-browning.  It that happened the pie would still be worth eating, it's all just about little details at some point.


About the picture of a pie here, someone might notice it's square (OMG!).  Round is more ideal, but it fits in the toaster oven space that way (really a larger baking oven version of a toaster oven, but not so different).


And the top isn't right; not dark and carmelized, because I made it covered.  That can actually affect taste just a little, but not much, so probably as well to leave it uncovered right at the end, but only right at the end if burning it when cooking in a smaller space than a normal oven is a concern.  The crust did stick a bit, too, due to that lapse in method I'd mentioned.  This is not so difficult to work around by not pressing it in the pan, and using a light flour dusting on the outside of the rolled dough.  Or not; that part doesn't affect the taste, just presentation.


For all the rough-edges in approach, I'll go ahead an offer my opinion of how it turned out compared to the standard version, using canned ingredients.  I think much better, which is kind of amazing given that I didn't use cinnamon.  Part of that was luck, since I'm out of practice (I've made this two or three times in the last 8 or 9 years).  Getting the spice balance right without measuring is a stretch; same for level of sweetness.  Even if it wasn't so great this is my pie, my own creation, and I enjoy cooking a lot more for my own input being part of the process.

If I were in the US I'd say I could just buy a store-bought pie if I wanted the completely standard version, but here I really can't.  There are pumpkin pies out there, somewhere, in specialty grocery stores or very expensive niche bakeries, but walking into a normal grocery store to get a normal version isn't an option.  I'm confident that this is one of the best pumpkin pies in existence in this city of 10 or 12 million people right now.


Now I just need more people to appreciate it.  My kids will eat a little but they're much happier to eat little handfuls of the whipped cream instead, all the more so since I cut that corner and bought the can of automatically whipped cream that they would love to make a meal of.