Kyl Haselbauer has 20 years of experience working in fine-dining and modernist kitchens, including Bar Cotto and Anchovies &amp; Olives in Seattle. He is also the owner of Bright Spot, a café and coffee shop in Seattle.

Kyl Haselbauer

This is a silky smooth butterscotch pudding with real butterscotch flavor that’s almost as easy to make as the stuff out of a box.After developing <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/vegan-no-bake-chocolate-custard">my egg-free chocolate “custard,”</a> I knew the combination of cashews and low-acyl gellan, a powerful <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/unlock-your-hydrocolloid-starter-pack">hydrocolloid</a>, creates a stable <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/the-science-of-fluid-gels">fluid gel</a> out of any flavorful liquid, and gets out of the way to let the liquid’s flavor shine. In just the right quantity, that gel has a perfect pudding consistency, and flavoring that pudding with butterscotch seemed like a no-brainer. Using the correct amount of gellan is crucially important to nailing the texture for this pudding, so you&#39;re going to need to use a digital scale, accurate to 1/10th of a gram.The primary flavors of butterscotch are brown sugar and butter, and since the gellan produces a plant-based pudding, I loaded up the pudding base with brown sugar and vegan butter to produce a true butterscotch-like flavor, which comes through bright and clean since there’s no dairy or eggs to get in the way.If you’re looking for the “butterscotch” flavor that’s in butterscotch-flavored candies and chips, I give you the option of adding butterscotch extract. It doesn’t taste anything like actual butterscotch, but it does taste like a lot of stuff you can buy on supermarket shelves.

Vegan Butterscotch Pudding