Katherine Sharpe | a pilgrim’s blogress

Failure! (Tapioca Pudding)

Tapioca grosses a lot of people out. There are many who’ve never even tried it. Yes, it’s the same shape as that fish-bait-smelling fish roe that you get at sushi restaurants sometimes if you’re not careful. But it’s pretty benign, just round and chewy. Suspended in a creamy, delicately vanilla-flavored pudding base, I like it a lot. Tapioca pudding is a fine old-fashioned dessert/snack, a hefty smack of sugar and starch and fat that you can tell yourself is still all right because it’s made with lots of milk.

Anyway, I tried to make tapioca pudding a few times in grad school, with mixed results (good flavor, bad texture; seems I bought regular tapioca pearls when the recipe called for quick-cooking, or something, so I ended up stirring for 45 minutes in disbelief, and still producing something like parboiled BBs of starch in a lovely pudding matrix). Anyway, I thought I’d learned something from that experience and that I’d give it another shot last week. I couldn’t find the recipe I had used before, so I bummed around on the internet until I found something that looked reasonably tasty.

I have to say: some of the things I cook in the kitchen are better, some are worse, but I don’t usually choke completely. This pudding, I ate half a serving of and actually ended up throwing the rest away. It wasn’t inedible, but it definitely wasn’t what I had in mind. Words I would use to describe it include rubbery, eggy, singed, and badly seasoned. I tried to surmise some of what went wrong, below, but if you have tapioca pudding insights, please feel free to share them with me. I’d like to know how to make this campy, comforting dish, and it doesn’t seem as though it should be that hard to.

Tapioca Failure

1/2 cup small pearl tapioca
3 cups milk (I used 2%)
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Mix tapioca, milk, and salt; simmer five minutes, add sugar gradually
Beat the eggs in a bowl
Mix some of the hot tapioca mixture into the eggs, a spoonful at a time, to warm the eggs up so that they don’t cook suddenly when they hit the pot, curdling the mixture
Mix in the warmed up egg mixture with the tapioca mixture on the stove
Bring this to a boil slowly, stirring the whole time
Stir constantly for a few minutes at low heat, until you get a pudding-like consistency
Cool for 15 minutes, add vanilla
Serve warm or chill and then serve (I did the latter)

Notes on a Tapioca Failure

Well, there were a few things that went wrong. First, I slightly burned the tapioca and milk mixture early on, creating these gummy, menstrual-looking brown bits that kept detaching from the bottom of the pot. Don’t be fooled when it says “simmer several minutes.” You have to keep stirring the entire time, to prevent burning.

Likewise, the whole thing of warming up the egg mixture. Do not skimp. Add lots of spoonfuls and get the eggs good and hot. I think I didn’t do enough of this, because my final pudding had a perceptible egginess to it, as if it were full of microscopic particles of cooked egg. I do not think that is what the recipe was aiming for.

Some tapioca recipes ask you to soak the tapioca in water overnight to soften it before cooking. This recipe didn’t, but I think it would be a good idea. The tapioca balls in this seemed almost,  but not quite done. Still a little too chewy. Ew. Also I think I prefer large pearl tapioca to small pearl, and which would doubtless take a lot longer to cook, so soaking seems wise.

In the end, the vanilla flavor was overdone and cloying. I think that is partly what I get for buying the cheapest vanilla at the store, and partly what I get for pouring in a bit too much (demoralized by early indications that this recipe wasn’t going to turn out, viz. menstrual-looking bits, I’d lost the discipline to use measuring spoons).

Consistency: I was worried while cooking that the pudding wouldn’t be firm enough, but in the end, it chilled down to a rubbery consistency, almost reminiscent of those pale-blue dissection mats we used to use in high school biology class. Not ideal. Should I have stopped cooking when the pudding looked a lot more watery? But then the pearls would have been even more underdone. Anyway, maybe the lesson is that if you’re going to chill the pudding, it will set up a lot, so you don’t need to cook it to the consistency you’d want to eat it at.

All in all, I think I could have gone to buy a tub of cool, delicious Kozy Shack Tapioca Pudding for approximately the price I paid for the ingredients of this homemade disaster. I think I may attempt tapioca pudding again at some point—if for no other reason than I can hardly imagine what else I’ll do with the extra tapioca balls I now own—but I think I’ll try a different recipe if I do. Perhaps you know a good one?

“Tapioca grosses a lot of people out.” aaaaaaand i’m done.

Egginess = your eggs scrambled a bit. This recipe seems like it couldn’t have ended up any other way, though – boiling after adding eggs = scrambling your eggs = eggy taste. I’d look for another recipe before giving up!!

You could make bubble tea with the rest of the tapioca! I just finally sucessfully cooked a batch of around 103 tapioca pearls and had it with watermelon juice (watermelon+a little water in a mixer) and it was really good! If your gona cook tapioca only for that kind of use, theres a lot of tips I can give you e.g: if you want them bigger, cook them and let them sit in the pot over night…The instructions of the packaging arnt always right ect….
Don’t worry, im sure you’ll get it! the one thing tapioca taught me was to have patience and persistance :P

i made pretty good tapioca following a similar recipe except i put all the ingredients (minus vanilla) in a pot and mixed well, i let that sit for 5 mins then put on medium and stirred constantly until it started boiling to the point where it was still bubbling as i stirred

I know I’m late in commenting here but it seems as though the egg:milk ratio is off (also the 2% milk didn’t help matters much).
The basic premise of the recipe seems to be adding tapioca pearls to a custard. Think of making a rice pudding with that approach. Exactly.
Good luck.

Bob’s Red Mill brand tapioca has a great recipe on the back of the bag. It is light and pudding-y and delicate. The only thing I personally modified was adding more tapioca pearls, as I like more tapioca texture, and without adding more pearls, it just tastes like vanilla pudding. I like the tapioca taste. You separate the egg yolks from the whites, cook the tapioca with milk and yolks until boiling, then add the whipped egg whites and sugar and allow to cool before adding vanilla. Good luck.

My receipe calls for 3 tablespoons of tapioca, not a half cup. But I followed the receipe on the box and I too had a problem, mine tasted great, but did not set up. :(