best chocolate pudding
All I wanted to give you for Valentine’s Day was some chocolate pudding. My logic was simple: decadent meals and rich desserts are dreamy things but, in my mind, not inherently romantic. More often than not, after such an evening I find myself too full for even a nightcap, and I want a nap.
But classic chocolate pudding is none of these things. The perfect recipe–the one I waded through dozens and dozens to find–would be chocolaty but not overly heavy, indulgent but not too rich. In short, the kind of thing you’d want to eat with the love of your life without the risk of shortening the length of it. As a bonus, it would be a reasonable recipe to tackle on a weekday night.
This turned out to be a surprisingly complicated feat. You see, chocolate pudding has lost its way. Over the years, as chocolate desserts have gotten more and more decadent, so-called “puddings” have followed suit. Suddenly, the chocolate pudding that your grandmother made for your mother, or your mother made for you has been poshed up with cream and butter and egg yolks. They’re made in food processors, they’re hit up with immersion blenders, they’re lightened with whipped egg whites, they’re baked in ramekins in water baths covered with tented foil. While these desserts are many wonderful things–pot-de-cremes, pasty creams, souffles–puddings, to me, they are not.
And this is the point where I cannot progress in this story without tell you how my mother feels about making chocolate pudding from scratch: she thinks it is pointless, and not because she doesn’t adore chocolate pudding. My mother frequently tells the story about the day when my sister and I were young, and set out to replace the My-T-Fine stuff we knew and loved with one she made from scratch. The result? It took forever and tasted exactly like the stuff from the box and she vowed to never make it again. “Some things,” she says when I wax on, conspiring to make my own sourdough starter, yogurt, or marshmallows, “are just not worth it.”
Of course, I didn’t listen and dove first into a recipe from someone I adore so much, it broke my heart that I hated the recipe. You started in a double-boiler, then a saucepan, then move over to the food processor, then the food processor a second time, then the saucepan again and then the food processor. No, I am not making this up. It had egg yolks, a whole egg, butter, cocoa powder and bittersweet chocolate in it and I just don’t know what I was thinking. I was almost embarrassed to tell my mother that it was good–oh, and we did eat it with nary a complaint–but not even mindblowing. To her credit, she spared me the “I told you so.”
And this was when I remembered something, well, really quite mindless. Skimming down to item #43 in the “sweets” subsection of my Cook This list, there was the blissful, three-step (oh, and the third one is “chill”), egg-, butter-, cream-, food processor- and oven-free 22 minute chocolate pudding from John Scharffenberger of Scharffenberger Chocolate that Luisa had posted about over a year ago. You see, the best recipe was already out there, and with a bunch of adjustments to suit my own fussy proclivities, now it is here too. Perhaps if my mother had tried this recipe instead, I’d be getting my sourdough starter from her!
This recipe got fresh photos in 2024, but here are some of the 2008 originals, in case you’re feeling nostaligic:
One year ago: Green Tea Cookie with White Chocolate Filling
Silky Classic Chocolate Pudding
- 1/4 cup (30 grams) cornstarch
- 3 tablespoons (15 grams) unsweetened cocoa powder (optional)
- 1/2 cup (100 grams) granulated sugar
- 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
- 3 cups (680 grams) whole milk (for best taste) or 2% milk
- 6 ounces (180 grams) bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped (or 1 cup dark chocolate chips)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- On the stove: In a medium saucepan, whisk together the cornstarch, cocoa powder (if using, see Notes at end), sugar, and salt. Add the milk in a thin stream, whisking the whole time so that lumps do not form. Heat mixture over medium-low heat and whisk frequently, scraping the bottom and sides, until mixture is steaming but has not yet simmered — do not let the mixture come to a boil. It will thicken enough to coat the back of a spoon; this takes 5 to 8 minutes. Add the chocolate and stir until it has melted and is fully incorporated. Remove from heat and stir in the vanilla.
- Bittersweet chocolate is my preference here, anything in the 60% to 72% range.
- You can reduce the sugar to 1/3 cup for a less sweet pudding.
- For a non-dairy option, this recipe also works with oat milk or coconut milk.
For the silkiest pudding texture, you can pour this mixture through a fine-mesh strainer.
In the fridge: Distribute among individual pudding cups or one large serving bowl, and chill until it is cool and set, about 2 to 3 hours for individual pudding cups and 4 to 5 hours for a large bowl. Cover tightly with plastic wrap so that no skins forms, unless you’re an oddball like me who likes pudding skin.
Do ahead: This pudding keeps for 3 days in the fridge but nobody I know has ever allowed it to last that long.
Notes: Over the last, whoa, 16 years, this recipe has had several updates. In 2013, I got rid of the pesky double-boiler step, that also made this take forever to cook. Later in the year, I started deepening the chocolate flavor by replacing an ounce of the bittersweet chocolate with unsweetened but I ditched this a few years later by adding some unsweetened cocoa powder. It’s optional, but if you want more chocolate intensity, this is an easy way. A couple more notes:
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