Tapioca Pudding Is a Comfort Food

TAPIOCA PUDDING is one of those desserts you either have a fond memory of — maybe your grandmother always made it for you — or you find disgusting. It is smooth, but then what’s the deal with all those little balls in it? And yet there is a lovely sweet blandness to it. It could well be one of your comfort foods. Tapioca comes from the manioc or cassava plant, native to South America, and a staple there and in Africa, where the pearls are called Boba. It is considered a very digestible form of carbohydrate.

I served a batch of tapioca pudding to some dinner guests, and one has since requested the recipe. It was a light, pleasant end to the meal. Really, I pretty much just followed the recipe on the box of Let’s Do Organic small pearl tapioca. I used their options down at the bottom of the recipe, and I left one ingredient out (shredded coconut). It’s a pretty easy recipe. If you serve it in little fluted pudding cups, it will seem more special.

Ingredients

2 cups — water

3 Tblsp. — Tapioca pearls, small pearl variety

2 Tblsp. — sugar

Sprinkle of salt

2/3 cup — light coconut milk (reduced fat organic version)

A banana — sliced, with a little lemon on it to keep it from browning

In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, boil the water before adding the tapioca pearls. Use a fork or whisk when pouring them in, to help keep them from bunching together. Let the tapioca cook for about fifteen minutes until it is looking more translucent, the mixture now seeming a little thicker and cloudy-looking. 

 

Add in the coconut milk, sugar, and salt. Stir it together and let it cook an additional ten to fifteen minutes. Place a few slices of bananas in each cup and pour the pudding over them. Let the cups sit until they are just warm, and then refrigerate until cooled.

Alternately, you could refrigerate the tapioca pudding in one mixing bowl or the pan itself. Mix it all together before dolloping servings into small glasses or bowls. If you have some Soyatoo whipped cream, that would be fun to squirt on top.

Tapioca pudding can be made with some other kind of milk, like rice or soy, but the coconut gives it a little extra flavor. If you added some vanilla, that would help too.