Recipe: How to make the perfect rice pudding

We all have things in life that we're not very proud of. Until recently, one of mine was the revulsion I harboured for rice pudding. This is entirely attributable to the stuff we were given at school, which was snow white, astonishingly bland and served with a mean little dollop of chewy red jam slopped carelessly in the middle. Having made six different recipes in the past three days, however, I've finally realised the error of my ways: A bowl of rice pudding is one of the most wonderfully comforting sights on Earth.

The main ingredient in rice pudding isn't actually rice. It's milk. The classic choice is, of course, pudding or short-grain rice.

The method

Marcus Wareing and Angela Hartnett cook rice pudding on the hob, as opposed to baking them. Introduced as "definitely not the kind you had at school", Wareing's pudding certainly sounds promising. With as much double cream as milk, five egg yolks and a vanilla pod, it sounds like a different dish and tastes like it too.

Overwhelmingly rich and heavy with vanilla, it is more like a rice custard than a pudding. It may not be bland and slippery but this isn't the pudding to change my mind.

For the same amount of rice, Hartnett's version uses milk, an egg yolk and half a vanilla pod, which bodes well. It's creamy and lightly flavoured. However, although the pudding is finished off under the grill, there's no sign of the skin that seasoned pudding lovers claim is the best bit of the dish. Given my fondness for custard skin, I decide baking is the way to go.

Simon Hopkinson and Linsday Bareham's recipe uses 150ml of double cream to a litre of milk but, thankfully, no custardy egg yolks. It's heavenly stuff: Cooked for two hours, the rice is squidgy, the consistency luxurious and the skin golden.

Using Hopkinson's recipe as my template, I've added sweet spices and a little bit of lemon zest to take this classic nursery dish back towards its ancient roots.

The recipe

Ingredient:

Method:
Pre-heat the oven to 140°C. Put the butter in a flameproof pie dish over a gentle heat and, when melted, add the sugar. Stir and cook for a few minutes, then tip in the rice and stir to coat. Cook until the rice has swelled slightly, stirring continuously, then add the milk and stir well.

Add the lemon zest, bay leaf, spices and a pinch of salt. Pour in the cream and bring to simmer.

Bake the pudding in the oven for about two hours, until it has set but is still slightly wobbly; it may need a little longer than this but check on it regularly. Serve warm but not piping hot.

Servings: 4