This creamy, refined sugar free vegan rice pudding is deliciously flavored with cinnamon and cardamom! Serve it with a spiced persimmon compote or any fruit of your choice!
Rice pudding (or “Milchreis” as we call is here in Germany) is a very popular dish here. It’s even served as lunch sometimes! Not my kind of lunch but my 6 year old loves it and if it was up to him, he would probably eat this for lunch regularly. It’s definitely one of his highlights when we go spend a few hours at the zoo and eat lunch at the restaurant there.
Lately, I’ve realized how easy it is to actually make rice pudding! It’s basically rice and some kind of milk in it’s simplest form. Add spices, sweetener or whatever you like to make it your own but the base ingredients are simple. However, what you also need to have is patience! Cooking the rice is gonna take some time and you cannot rush the process. And you need to stir every now and then too so stay close by.
I started this rice pudding off by adding some warm spices to the rice as the main flavors – in this case a cinnamon stick (ground cinnamon will also work) and ground cardamom. I am obsessed with the flavor of cardamom and it’s way underused in my opinion. More baked goods or desserts should contain cardamom!! Are you also a fan?
I also added raisins during the cooking process for two reasons. The first one is that the raisins get nice and soft when cooked with the rice. The other reason is that they naturally release some sweetness into the rice pudding so you need less sweetener at the end. Actually, I only added a tablespoon of honey to the rice pudding when the rice was soft and that was plenty sweet for me.
And since I had a whole bunch of persimmon lying around, it only made sense to make a persimmon compote to go with it! I loved it with the persimmons but my son (being more sceptical of unknown fruit) ate his with berries. Both versions are delicious in their own way!
The persimmon compote is spiced as well so you’ve got the double winter spice kick which I love. I used a pumpkin spice agave syrup to sweeten the compote a bit and that worked really well. If you can’t find that, just add pumpkin spice and a sweetener of your choice instead.
Will you make this for dessert soon? Or how about my Vegan Peanut Butter Chocolate Pudding?
Vegan Rice Pudding & Persimmon Compote
Description
This creamy, refined sugar free vegan rice pudding is deliciously flavored with cinnamon and cardamom! Serve it with a spiced persimmon compote or any fruit of your choice!
Ingredients
Spiced Rice Pudding
Persimmon Compote
Instructions
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Add short-grain rice, almond milk, water, raisins, salt, ground cardamom and ground cinnamon (or the whole stick of cinnamon) to a pot.
Bring to a boil, then reduce the temperature to a simmer and simmer for 35 minutes while stirring every now and then.
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Take the pot off the heat and add in honey and 1/4 cup milk. Stir well.
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For the compote, peel and chop the persimmons.
Add to a pot together with 6 tbsp of water and pumpkin spice agave syrup.
Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 20 - 25 minutes or until the persimmon are soft.
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In a small bowl, mix together cornstarch and 3 tbsp of water. Mix well, then add to the persimmons together with 1/4 cup water and date syrup. Simmer for a couple of minutes until it's a thick sauce.
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To assemble, distribute the rice pudding among three bowls. Add the compote on the side. Enjoy hot or cold!
Note
Pumpkin Spice Agave Syrup: This is the one I used.
