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 super creamy and smooth vanilla pudding that’s similar to the pudding cups you ate when you were a kid, but much better. (It also just happens to be vegan.)After developing <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/vegan-no-bake-chocolate-custard">my egg-free chocolate “custard,”</a> I wanted to showcase how the same, straightforward technique could be used to create perfectly textured puddings with clean and clear flavors. A vanilla pudding cup seemed to fit the bill. By using a combination of cashews and the powerful hydrocolloid low-acyl gellan, I knew I could make a good vanilla pudding; the main question I had was how it would compare to the stuff from the store.What was surprising is that it doesn’t. One spoonful of a store-bought pudding cup made me question every memory I have: it had a loose, almost slimy texture; it wasn’t sweet enough; and it barely tasted of vanilla.This recipe produces a pudding with a silky smooth texture with a robust vanilla flavor, slightly tempered by the faint notes of coconut from the inclusion of virgin coconut oil. Since <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/unlock-your-hydrocolloid-starter-pack">gellan is such a powerful gelling agent</a>, the pudding is also very stable, resistant to the weeping produced by syneresis. There’s a flipside to gellan’s gelling power, however: A little goes a very long way, so it’s crucial that you use a digital scale—accurate to 1/10th of a gram—when measuring it out. Add too much, and the pudding will be too firm.Of course, a great vanilla pudding has a lot of different applications. Add in tapioca pearls for the best tapioca pudding you’ve ever had; use it to build parfaits and layer cakes; turn it into pudding pops.

Perfect (Vegan) Vanilla Pudding