Pure Chocolate Pudding

There’s nothing simpler or more delicious than a good chocolate pudding.

What you get is pure. It’s deep, dark, silken chocolate, uncomplicated and unadorned by anything more than maybe a little cloud of whipped cream.

So why do some recipe writers make it seem so hard to fix?

That was my main question after running through half a dozen recipes the other day. I started out looking for the best chocolate pudding, but I ended up like some culinary deconstructionist, pondering how so many cooks could take such different approaches to such a simple dish.

First, I’m talking about the simplest chocolate pudding, what the French call pots de creme, to my mind the epitome of a chocolate pudding. It is essentially a chocolate-flavored baked custard--nothing more than eggs, milk or cream, chocolate and sugar.

American puddings, admirable though they are, are usually made with a little cornstarch. This gives a slightly stiffer texture and perhaps a slightly muted flavor. Most important, since you can get a perfect result without cornstarch, why add it?

You’d think something like pots de creme would have long ago been perfected into a kind of engraved-in-stone standard recipe, with only a few variations for fine points of flavor. But it turns out that there are many pathways to perfection. Some are direct and others seem to wander endlessly.

The first pudding I tackled represented a middle road. It was from “La Cuisine de France,” by Mapie, the Countess de Toulouse-Lautrec (Bonanza Books, 1966), which for a time was a bible of French bourgeois cooking. Her recipe, which she calls creme au chocolat a l’ancienne, is pretty much the standard. She melts chocolate in a double boiler, adds milk and brings it to a boil, then beats the heated chocolate milk into egg yolks beaten with sugar before baking them in custard cups.

This recipe may well come from some previous ur-text of French cooking, because it is almost exactly the technique recommended by several other writers from that period.

But the technique is not good enough for Maida Heatter. She is famous for writing recipes so painstakingly detailed that success is all but assured, and she includes a pots de creme recipe in “Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Chocolate Desserts” (Alfred Knopf, 1980) that takes almost three pages to explain.

But explaining at length is one thing, complicating is another. In this recipe, Heatter has you heat cream in a saucepan, melt chocolate and cream in a double boiler and stir egg yolks in a mixing bowl. Then she has you add the sugar to the scalded cream, stir the chocolate until it is smooth, add the hot cream to the chocolate mixture and then stir everything into the yolks.

In case you weren’t counting, that makes seven steps involving at least three pans, not including the ramekins and water bath for baking. Nothing like destroying a kitchen to make a chocolate pudding.

By comparison, Joel Robuchon’s recipe in “Simply French,” which he co-wrote with Patricia Wells (William Morrow, 1991) is a model of simplicity. That’s saying something for a recipe by a French chef. Robuchon scalds the milk and adds the chocolate; beats egg yolks and sugar and then adds the hot chocolate to the egg yolks. That’s three steps, two pans.

Where Robuchon gets complicated is in the details. He lets the finished egg mixture rest for an hour before baking, so that any foam generated by the mixing will float to the top to be skimmed off. That may add a subtle fine point to the texture, but I had hardly any foam on top of my custard mixture and the result was no better than the puddings made without doing it.

Either my palate is not attuned to the finer points of three-star cuisine or perhaps the skimming is more necessary if you have some underpaid flunky in the kitchen whipping up your pots de creme for you.

Still, it was a very good chocolate pudding put together in a relatively direct manner. But it wasn’t as good as Richard Sax’s in “Classic Home Desserts” (Chapters, 1994), which was even simpler to make. The late Sax was a skilled home cook whose recipes shine with commonsense simplicity. How does he make pots de creme? He brings chocolate, milk and cream to a boil, whisks eggs, egg yolks and sugar and then combines the two mixtures.

Sax uses another simple trick to make his pudding taste better. Custards are usually built from egg yolks and cream. They are prime examples of what scientists call a phase shift. That sounds like something from “Star Trek,” but it means something quite simple. In a custard, the mixture starts out a liquid sol (raw egg proteins dispersed in the milk) and winds up a firmer gel (cooked egg proteins forming a network containing the liquid).

Usually cooks use egg yolks to provide the protein because they add a richness to the texture as well. What makes Sax’s custard taste better is that he uses whole eggs for part of the protein, essentially substituting relatively tasteless egg white for egg yolk.

That allows the chocolate flavor to come through more directly, without the masking effect of the egg yolk. Paradoxically, because of the natural creaminess of chocolate, his pudding feels as rich and tastes more chocolatey than the others, despite being lower in fat.

Tastes better, easier to make, lower in fat. Sounds like a recipe for success.

Chocolate Pots de Creme

Active Work Time: 10 minutes * Total Preparation Time: 45 minutes

Adapted from Richard Sax’s “Classic Home Desserts” (Chapters, 1994).

1/4 pound chocolate, finely chopped

1 cup whipping cream

1 cup milk

2 eggs plus 2 yolks

1/3 cup sugar

Lightly sweetened whipped cream, optional

* Bring chocolate, whipping cream and milk just to boiling point in small saucepan, stirring occasionally. When steam appears at edges of pan, remove from heat and whisk smooth.

* While liquid ingredients are cooking, lightly beat eggs, egg yolks and sugar to combine in medium mixing bowl. Do not let mixture get foamy.

* Whisking gently, dribble 1/4 cup hot milk mixture into eggs. Whisk until smooth. Gradually add more hot milk, whisking constantly, until all milk is combined with eggs. Pour through strainer into pitcher or 4-cup mixing cup.

* Divide mixture equally among 8 (1/2-cup) ramekins. Egg mixture should fill ramekins only 2/3 to 3/4 full. Place baking pan on middle rack of 300-degree oven and place ramekins in pan. Fill pan with very hot water to halfway up sides of ramekins. Cover loosely with sheet of foil or baking sheet and bake until edges are set and center of custard still trembles when shaken, 30 to 35 minutes.

* Remove baking pan from oven. Remove ramekins from baking pan and cool. Cover tightly and refrigerate until serving time. Serve, passing lightly sweetened whipped cream to add as wished.

8 servings. Each serving, without whipped cream: 217 calories; 34 mg sodium; 124 mg cholesterol; 8 grams fat; 18 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams protein; 0.14 gram fiber.

217 calories; 34 mg sodium; 124 mg cholesterol; 8 grams fat; 18 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams protein; 0.14 gram fiber.