Golden Yolky Rice Pudding

Laced with saffron, ghee and sunny egg yolks

When I miscarried a few years back I really didn’t have much of an appetite during the weeks following, but what I did feel like eating when I needed to was nostalgic foods and home comforts. For me this meant buttery potatoes, baked beans, toast, soup and rice pudding.

Rice pudding is one of the most comforting and gentle foods I can think of. It’s easy to digest, especially if you do well with dairy, which I do, it’s filling and it’s full of nourishing fats. I haven’t made a dairy-free coconut version but you most certainly can and I bet it’s delicious!

I decided to make and freeze a big batch for postpartum recovery, thinking what more could my needy body want that a bowl of maple-sweetened, creamy rice laced with warming spices and rich nutty ghee. A quick search and you will find thousands of rice pudding recipes from all over the world, with differences most prominently in the type of rice used and the method used for cooking.

In England “pudding rice” is used, which you can’t even find here in the US, but it’s essentially a short, round grain rice with husks removed. This makes it very absorbent and creamy, and fairly similar to arborio rice most commonly used in risottos. You’ll also notice that most rice pudding recipes are baked at a low temperature for many hours, or cooked in a double-boiler. I don’t have the luxury of that with my small boat oven and limited propane supply so I opted to find a way to make this quickly on the stove top, and let’s just say I won’t be going to back to the oven way any time soon! In under 30 minutes I had myself a pot of supremely creamy, tender rice perfectly thickened with cream and egg yolks. It’s an absolute winner of a method and recipe and I will be revisiting it often in the months to come.