Tapioca Pudding - no soaking, stirring or waiting! (2024)

Cook tapioca pudding in minutes with a pressure cooker, not hours of soaking, stirring and waiting.

There are lots of ways to make pudding with tapioca and when coming up with this recipe I immediately excluded the ones that include eggs. Eggs are just not necessary to hold together tapioca and just make the pudding more complicated and too heavy and flan-like to propose for summer.

My family has been eating lots of tapioca puddings to get this recipe just right for you!

Here’s a peek at the process I go through when developing a recipe that hasn’t been made in the pressure cooker before – and how some of my discoveries are helped by an accident, or two.

About this recipe

I started out with soaking tapioca pearls for an hour as just about everyone recommends. Soaking removed most of the tapioca’s natural starch during the process and the pudding was kind of runny. Next, accidentally distracted by the kids, I just dumped the dry pearls straight in the milk – when I realized my mistake I added a little extra liquid to compensate for what would have been absorbed during a soak and cooked the tapioca a little longer. Using the tapioca straight out of the bag resulted in a pudding seemed a little “too” stiff (too much starch!). On the plus side, I was surprised that without soaking the tapioca pearls were pretty evenly cooked. This told me that, at least when making tapioca under pressure, you don’t have to pre-soak it. And that is how I arrived at rinsing the tapioca – to remove a little of the surface starch but not so much so the pudding won’t hold together.

Both the beauty and bane of pressure cooking is that there is no stirring during the cooking process. In my experiments I found that the tapioca pearls tended to clump a little at the base of the heat-proof container – and those clumps would contain under-cooked pearls. Mixing everything post-pressure cooking with a fork – and covering tightly while still hot allowed for the under-cooked pearls to catch-up and finish cooking while the pudding is cooling.

Tweak it as you like it
Substitute the cow’s milk with coconut or even a nut milk, the sugar for your favorite sweetener (raw sugar works really well), andto get different flavors the infusion with the zest of half an orange, or lemon (in the finished photos), half a vanilla pod (as in the step-by-step photos) or even a teaspoon of your favorite mixed spice mix (like chai tea). Dried fruit can also add a winter flare – re-hydrate the fruit for 10 minutes in hot water first so you don’t throw off the liquid:tapioca ratio.

Instead of using a heat-proof dish, you can actually make this directly in a heat-proof pudding mold, then mix,refrigerate as directed, and finally invert on a serving plate for a show-stoppingelegant formed pudding!