Budino di riso con salsa mou - Rice pudding with toffee sauce

Budino di riso con salsa mou - made in individual moulds to avoid excessive greadiness

This is Marcello dall’Aglio’s mum’s recipe for rice pudding, as she wrote it out for me when we came for lunch one bitterly cold day in Bologna around Christmas 1990. An apt dish for winter. A perfect accompaniment is salsa mou, toffee sauce. Make more than you need and store it in the fridge. The addition of the eggs makes this a denser pudding than the English version. It needs to be sliced rather than spooned onto the place.

Dare I say that you can improve the method by boiling the rice in water until it is soft and most of the water has evaporated, then adding the rest of the ingredients? That way, the rice is less likely to stick to the bottom of the pan. Otherwise, you must watch it like a hawk.

Ingredients

for the rice pudding

1 lt whole milk

2 tbl rice for risotto

pinch salt

1 zest of a lemon

150 g sugar

50 g vanilla sugar

2 large eggs

1 large egg yolk

for the toffee sauce

300g sugar

150ml single cream

Method

1. Boil the milk and add the rice, salt, lemon zest and the sugar.

2. Simmer carefully for about an hour until the rice is soft. Allow to cool.

3. Beat together the eggs and add to the rice mixture.

4. Tip into a buttered oven dish and place in a bain-marie half full of water.

5. Bake in a medium oven for about 2 hours until the top only just begins to brown.

6. Heat the sugar in a pan until it begins to caramelise. Remove from the heat.

7. Heat the cream in another pan. Slowly and carefully add to the sugar, combining the two with a wooden spoon.