What is a Christmas pudding without custard or cream? I guess a vegan one… and having a vegan event coming up I’ve been looking into vegan options. And they just seem like thickened non-dairy milk. So with what I have in the cupboard, and a few attempts:
- 500ml water
- 1/2c rolled oats
- pinch salt
- 1tbs olive oil
- 1 tbs besan (chickpea) flour
- 1tbs sugar, mix of white and brown
- 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp nutmeg
- 1 tsp vanilla
Blend oats with oil, water and salt, quite well. Then strain into a saucepan. Incidentally, this is an easy, fast way to make ‘oat milk’ which, in my opinion, is one of the best non-dairy milks.
Retrieve about 100ml back into the blender, and blend in the besan flour. Pour back into the oat milk, and heat on medium, whisking constantly, adding sugar and spices, until desired consistency (this made a nice thick custard). Whisk in vanilla and serve. This made a surprisingly good custard, it even kept well to the day after and heated up no problem. It can get a bit of a skin on it, so recommend keeping it in a tall container like a jar, and it worked fine just to stir this back in.
Sure my expectations were low after my last attempt at a vegan custard, but I even had the confidence to serve this to (non-vegan) others, who found it entirely edible and reached for seconds. Other recipes I looked at turned this into more of a pudding in and of itself, adding rosewater or citrus peel. Cardamom would be great as well for the flavourings. Most other recipes used cornflour, but I found this resulted in a paltry, translucent, ‘something missing’ type of taste, and I was thinking of maybe adding some nuts to try and round it out more. But then I had a nut-free requirement and had a brainwave re the besan flour. Not only does it kinda look like custard powder, but it also gave it a fuller flavour and opaque quality very much like custard powder. The finished product was not quite as yellow as custard. I guess if you wanted it yellow, my advice is to try annatto for colour; in a previous version I tried turmeric and it resulted in a horrific almost nuclear green-yellow tint. Or just use the tiniest pinch.
You should be able to get besan flour in any Indian store or section of the supermarket pretty cheaply, or in the fancy ‘wheat free’ section of the supermarket for a bit more. It is great to make pakoras, thicken sauces and soups, and make ‘Burmese tofu’ (similar to how you would make polenta to cut up, and apparently you can even fry this mix as chips, though I’ve never had much luck in that).
Recipes 