Rice Pudding Always Deserved More Respect

In her newsletter, baker Bronwen Wyatt, the “trendsetter” behind New Orleans’s Bayou Saint Cake, listed rice pudding as an “in” for 2024, writing: “IDK I just have a feeling about this one!!”

Wyatt’s “prediction” was somewhat tongue-in-cheek: Rice pudding — and arroz con leche, riz au lait, kheer, and so on — is a globally loved dessert that has never left homes or menus. At the same time, however, rice pudding also carries a sense of being misunderstood or underappreciated. The mental image might be grocery store Kozy Shack cups, and people often align themselves with the dueling schools of chocolate desserts or fruit desserts, leaving rice pudding in an awkward, less prominent in-between. But could rice pudding finally, in fact, be getting its due?

Look at menus around the country, and it’s a wonder rice pudding has ever been considered “boring.” In Iran, there is sholeh zard; in Mexico, there is arroz con leche; in Austin, the owners of Nixta, who come from the two cultures — Sara Mardanbigi’s parents immigrated from Iran, Edgar Rico’s immigrated from Mexico — make a rice pudding with both influences, using cardamom, turmeric, pistachios, cinnamon, and strawberry powder. The rice pudding at San Francisco’s Dalida resembles a Basque cheesecake, charred and drizzled with smoked caramel sauce; the kheer that will soon hit the menu at nearby Besharam will be topped with a sugar brulee.

Corrida, a “Spanish chophouse” in Boulder, Colorado, extends its love of beef to its desserts, occasionally offering rice pudding topped with green strawberries and beef tallow caramel. More often though, the rice pudding is vegan and paired with sorbet. Clearly, rice pudding is versatile and full of inspiration to draw from; every culture that relies on rice has found a way to also make it dessert.

For restaurants, rice pudding can also be smart logistics. It’s the only dessert on the seven-item menu at Traveling Mercies in Aurora, Colorado, a 400-square-foot cocktail and oyster bar that operates using only a toaster oven and a hot plate. Aside from being nostalgic for chef and owner Caroline Glover, the rice pudding (and its components of passionfruit jam and lime whipped cream) can be made ahead of service, served cold, and assembled quickly to order.

Even when juxtaposed against more flashy desserts on menus, the rice pudding can hold its own. Although TikTokers dining at New York City’s Claud tend to emphasize the wine bar’s supersized chocolate cake, its rice pudding is ever-popular, sometimes paired and eaten with the other desserts, according to co-owner Chase Sinzer. Instead of getting left behind by the cakes, the rice pudding “got brought up alongside [them],” Sinzer says. Inspired by co-owner Joshua Pinsky’s grandfather’s rice pudding, Claud’s is topped with Luxardo cherries and dusted with cinnamon.

Sinzer’s appreciation extends further: A rice pudding-filled croquembouche, made by New York restaurant Frenchette, towered on the dessert table at his 2023 wedding to food publicist Phoebe Ng. Just like pairing Claud’s rice pudding with its chocolate cake, “anything that works with custard cream, creme anglaise, ice cream, whipped cream can be replicated with rice pudding,” Sinzer says. “It’s the dairy-filling substitute that gives you a touch more texture, and a little bit more interesting experience.”

Following this logic, bakers are making clever riffs with rice pudding. At the now-closed Brooklyn diner MeMe’s, baker and recipe developer Bill Clark made a popular rice pudding pie. Dominique Ansel has been playing around with rice pudding-filled Cronuts, including a pale blue version made in partnership with paint brand Sherwin-Williams.

The Brooklyn bakery Otway put rice pudding Danish on its menu last fall. Initially topped with poached quince, the seasonal danish includes Meyer lemon confit and bergamot jam for the winter. To baker Caroline Tisdale, the spiced rice pudding feels like a distinctly wintry choice. The Danish can be full of “tons of peaches, plums, stone fruit, and berries” during the summer, she says, but in the winter, “you’re not going to be eating a mouthful of citrus, so the rice pudding carries a lighter amount of [fruit].”

Paola Velez, D.C.-based pastry chef and cookbook author, also sees rice pudding as a “versatile vessel.” She’s known for her rice pudding flan, which she published in Bryant Terry’s Black Food. Velez’s flan is inspired by memories of her husband’s late grandmother’s rice pudding. She’d spend all day adding and reducing coconut milk until her rice pudding was velvety smooth. Reflecting on that dessert, “I wanted to kind of present it in a different format,” says Velez.

To Velez, the combination of warm, long-cooked cinnamon, nutmeg, and coconut just made sense with the creaminess and burnt-caramel flavor of flan, while the rice adds a sensation that Velez compares to drinking boba. “You have these pops of intrigue,” she says. A finish of puffed rice offers additional texture. “It’s such a beautiful rendition of why I think rice is so important to not just the Hispanic and African diaspora, but [also] to the world,” Velez adds.

She’s used rice pudding in popsicles and semifreddo, and during a phone interview she offers further riffs — folded into buttercream or ice cream, and maybe even as arancini. “A lot of people think of rice pudding as boring, or what to do with leftover rice, and I think that’s not the case at all,” Velez says. For one thing, it’s harder than people often give it credit for, she explains. To her, desserts like rice pudding, flan, creme brulee, and panna cotta are erroneously treated as easy outs, leading people to serve subpar versions at restaurants and to see them at the bottom of the dessert hierarchy.

In reality, “they’re some of the hardest desserts to master and get right in texture, appearance, and presentation,” Velez says. “I think people need to restructure how they see that: Cake is easy; creamy desserts have a lot of room for error.”

But to Velez, rice pudding is ready for a little more respect — not only on its own but also in playful variations on the form. “I think that how people present rice pudding is going to get a lot more creative,” Velez says. “Rice is the girl.”