I hadn’t had banana pudding in a while, but I definitely know what to taste for

Time:1 hr 45 minutes

Ingredient Availability: 4/5

Difficulty: 1/5

Banana Pudding is one of my favorite desserts. I remember when I would visit some of my family in North Carolina when I was younger, I had a family member who would always make some banana pudding and I couldn’t get enough. I had never made it myself before, so seeing this recipe in Rodney’s book definitely piqued my interest. I was curious to see how making my own pudding would turn out and how similar it is to making a curd. With that being said, I went ahead and made it.

Key Ingredients and Omissions:

You might have a little trouble finding vanilla paste.

None of the ingredients in this recipe are particularly special, but one thing that not everyone has used before is vanilla paste. Vanilla extract is far more common and can do essentially the same things as vanilla paste, so I’d say you can substitute it here, as well. Given how much more expensive the paste is than the already expensive extract, I wouldn’t blame you. I do like the vanilla specks that the paste gives the final product, though. A mostly cosmetic difference. The banana should be ripe, so I let mine develop some brown spots before making this dish.

Tools:

Whisk
Hand mixer or Stand Mixer

Cooking Review:

Making Pudding: 23 Minutes

To start, I mixed the vanilla paste with the milk and warmed it over medium low heat. I checked and mixed it frequently to make sure that it didn’t boil. While it was warming, I mixed the rest of the pudding ingredients in a separate bowl. Once the milk was warmed, I whisked in a few tablespoons of it into the other pudding ingredients. When the pudding mixture had loosened up, I added all of it back into the pot with the warm milk and began whisking until it had thickened. I was whisking non-stop (with some help) for 9 minutes. The whisking is really just to keep anything from burning or overcooking at the bottom of the pan. The pudding was then strained and put into a bowl to cool to room temperature.

Whipping Cream: 5 minutes

While the pudding cooled, I whipped the cream in my stand mixer along with some powdered sugar. You can use a hand mixer, or even do it by hand. Doing it by had would probably take a while, though. I slightly over whipped my cream, but it still did the job. You should take yours to stiff peaks. Be sure to watch it the whole time, especially as it gets closer to being done, as it goes from medium to stiff to over whipped very quickly.

Overwhipped Cream — I took this one a little too far.

Assembly and cooling: 1 hour 10 minutes

Once the pudding had cooled, I laid my Nilla Wafers in the bottom of my baking dish then topped them with the pudding. I sliced my bananas to an even thickness and topped it all off with the whipped cream. I then let it cool in the refrigerator for an hour before eating.

Analysis:

The star of this recipe is definitely the pudding. It has a great texture and a strong vanilla flavor that is well balanced by the not too sweet whipped cream. However, I think there was a little too much cream in this recipe, as many bites are mostly whipped cream. I think that if there was a starting layer of cream to split it into two smaller layers instead of one big layer, it would help solve this problem. I also think that this could’ve been even better if the pudding had some banana flavors infused into it somehow. It would’ve really made it a BANANA Pudding instead of vanilla pudding with bananas. In any case, I was pretty impressed by the end result. It was a very easy recipe to make and the little effort is easily worth it. I’m giving this recipe an 8/10. With a few tweaks to make every bite as good as the best bites, this could be a go to banana pudding recipe.

P.S.

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