How to Make Vegan Coconut Jasmine Rice Pudding with Lychees

Hi everyone, I'm Claire Sappitz. Welcome to my home kitchen. Today I'm showing you a recipe that is three things all at the same time. It is delicious, it is vegan, and it is gluten-free. It has this delicate flavor of jasmine and coconut. And I'm excited to show it to you. Okay. I love rice pudding. I love it so much. I put I think three different recipes for it in what's for dessert in my second cookbook. It's like a thing people say in whisper like I love rice pudding. It's like say it out loud. It's delicious. It's a great dessert. It is in this category of desserts that's like a starchy base that's kind of cooked soft in like dairy or something sweet. And this version is vegan because I'm

using as my base coconut milk and rice milk. I think it's a really great recipe to have in your toolbox if there's any dietary restrictions. But it's also a pantry recipe because it uses canned coconut milk, rice milk, a shelf stable. I'm using a can of leuches. That's kind of like the finishing touch for to really play up the tropical flavors and dried coconut and rice. So, and jasmine tea. There's We'll We'll get to that. You don't miss the gluten or the dairy or the eggs. So, for the ingredients, I already have about the can, but this is two cans of unsweetened regular coconut milk. Not light coconut milk, not coconut cream, not anything. Just regular full fat

coconut milk. Then I have two cups of rice milk. You could use like any nondairy milk replacement, but I'm making rice pudding. Might as well use rice milk. I have one cup of jasmine rice. So, this recipe is really all about the kind of like floral flavors without it being You never want something like taste like soap. But I love jasmine. Jasmine is maybe my number one favorite scent. And so, I'm using jasmine rice and jasmine tea. I just love the flavor of jasmine rice. Not that's the same thing as jasmine, but like just playing around with that idea. I have four jasmine green tea bags. Then I have a half a cup of sugar, a can of luchi. Canned leuches are so delicious and something that I feel like I want to use more in desserts cuz

they're so good and easy. A little salt, a little vanilla, and then these are coconut chips. You could just take large flake unsweetened coconut and toast it. These are like chips that come in a little bag. They are so good. They're just toasted and like a tiny bit sweet. Anyway, this is a little finishing touch on top. You could use really any long grain white rice, but I particularly like the flavor of jasmine rice for this. I'm going to cook everything here. I think the recipe says a large saucepan, but I had this out. We're going to cook it in this Dutch oven. I have a hand blender, and that's because one of the things I found when I was

testing this recipe is that if you just use straight coconut milk out of the cans, it can give the final pudding like a little bit of a graininess. And that's because the fat particles in coconut milk are kind of big. And so I use a hand blender. You could use a regular blender to blend it and break them up. You get like a much smoother pudding. So that is kind of like a piece of special equipment. And then everything else is super straightforward. You need a strainer, a couple bowls. That's it. I'm going to put my luchi cheese and my coconut chips are for serving along with one tea bag. So I'm going to just move these aside. bring these guys over here. So, we're going to start by cooking everything

together. This recipe is so easy. There's kind of like one step, more or less, which is cooking the pudding. So, I'm going to get my heat on. Sometimes you open a can of coconut milk and it's like smooth like this. Like, this is pretty homogeneous. Sometimes you open it and you have total separation between the fat and the liquid. This version is like actually really homogeneous. And I would go ahead and look at the ingredients. Sometimes you see that there's like a stabilizer in there to keep it homogeneous. I would look for one that doesn't have a lot of stabilizers or other ingredients and obviously nothing sweetened. Sometimes you get coconut milk that's separated and sometimes it's not. But whatever

your coconut milk looks like, you're still going to want to blend it. If you have that separation between the fat and the coconut water, heat it up before you blend it. Like get it get the coconut fat melted and then blend it. But here it's already homogeneous. So, I'm just going to stick my blender in here on high and get it well combined. 30 seconds or so. I love a hand blender because you can do everything right in the pot and this is kind of a one pot dessert. If you only have a standard blender, that's fine.

Just you can just dump the cans right in the jar of your blender and blend them and then add it to your pot. So, that's all we need from the hand blender. To this, I'm going to add my rice milk, 2 cups. Now, we're going to add our sugar. This is just straight granulated sugar. It's not a particularly sweet recipe. And then our salt. There's It's a good amount of salt because the flavors are sort of subtle and it needs the salt there to like really kind of give it a little oomph. So, this is going to sort of come up to a simmer. I'll stir occasionally to dissolve the sugar. And next thing I want to do is rinse the rice. Rice has a ton of starch on the

individual grains. And if you don't rinse it, there's like so much starch that gets into the rice pudding that it becomes too thick. So, we're going to rinse this. So, I'm just going to put it in my strainer and get it under some cold water. Okay. So, I want to really swish this around. The water becomes cloudy from that surface starch. Look at that water. So, I'm just going to keep rinsing in maybe another one or two more changes of water until it's clear. This is just going to help prevent the rice pudding from being overly starchy and too thick and like kind of gloopy. The rice as it cooks is already going to release a certain amount of starch to thicken it, which you want, but like you

just don't want it to be too thick and too starchy. That's this is going to help prevent that. I'm using the strainer for this. Obviously, keep hold on to the strainer cuz you're going to use it in a later step. This mixture is coming up to a simmer just about. And now I'm going to add the rice. We're going to cook this at a low simmer. I'm going to turn down the heat a little bit. It takes 30 to 40 minutes for the rice to fully cook through and become tender. So, we're going to cook this, stirring occasionally. You want to stir so that the rice doesn't stick to itself or to the bottom of the pot. One rule of rice pudding is cook the rice until it's really soft because this is

served cold. A lot of rice puddings are served chilled. And when it's cold, any al dente quality in the rice is going to become more noticeable. So, it's like you want to cook it until it's really tender, even like a little mushy, because then when it's cold, it firms up. So, that takes around 30 to 40 minutes. And I'm going to keep an eye on it. And then I'm also going to get my jasmine tea ready. So, this is how we infuse the rice pudding with the flavor of jasmine tea. So, when I was testing this recipe, I remember feeling like, oh, it's just not very jasminey. Like, how do I get that flavor in there? And this is really how I do it is I'm going to make a really strong concentrated

tea. So I'm using three tea bags. And then I have a fourth behind me. I'm going to use that for the lies. I'll show you that. So now I'm going to get some boiling water. I need 1 and 1/4 cups of boiling water that I'm going to pour into here to steep a really strong jasmine tea. So I'm going to get that going. This could be anything. I just don't want to bother with the kettle. I'm going to get this going behind me for boiling water. The method that I found most effective for getting that jasmine tea flavor and keeping like the aromomas and the kind of delicate flavors was making a concentrated tea and then adding it after the rice

pudding is done cooking. And there's a benefit to that too because the final rice pudding is super thick. And this way you're kind of like diluting it with that tea and it's going to give you the desired texture after it's chilled. So, I'm just going to keep stirring this occasionally as it cooks. And you'll know that it's done because the rice will be tender, but aside from that, the whole mixture is going to have thickened and you're going to have this mixture where it's like you don't have this separation of rice and liquid. The whole thing is this kind of like homogeneous thick texture and the grains will be translucent and tender. So, we're going to just keep going and I'm going to make my tea and then we'll add that at the end.

So, this mixture is ready and the grains of rice are swollen and translucent and tender. So, this is done. I'm going to turn it off. It's done cooking. And this texture is really nice. It has this like ooziness, but we serve it cold. And when it chills, it's going to tighten up a lot and thicken. So, that's why we're going to add this tea. And that is going to introduce all of those delicate flavors of the jasmine and the green tea. So, I'm going to add that. I'm also going to add some vanilla. And I add the vanilla off the heat because I don't want it to have spent all that time cooking. I want that flavor to be sort of more fresh and prominent. So, I'm going to stir this through. Yeah,

now it's a little bit beige from that tea. So, now it looks a little soupy, but everything's going to thicken as it chills. I saved those tea bags because we are going to let the tea bags slowly infuse even further into the rice pudding as it chills in the refrigerator. So, let me transfer this to the bowl. I just splattered it. That's okay. All right. Let me just scrape in that last bit. I like I love using a Dutch oven, but like I am not They're so heavy. It's like so hard to get everything in with one hand.

I'm going to just make sure those tea bags are submerged and then cover this and chill. So, you could do this ahead of time. The dessert lasts a really long time in the fridge. And then I have one that I made last night and is now cold. And before I get it out, I'm going to show you how to do my little luchy topping with that last tea bag. So, before serving, we're going to prepare our luchies for topping. So going to the idea here is that we're going to infuse the luchi syrup with some of the jasmine green tea. So I'm going to drain them over my saucepan. They also just look so cool. I love these. Now I'm going to get the syrup warming up. I'm going to bring it to a simmer just like I'm making a tea with it. And while that's coming up, I'm

going to slice the leuches in half. This is just a visual thing. This is just cuz I like the way it looks for serving. I remember the first time I ever had a luchi, I was like, "What is this flavor?" They are so They're kind of magical. Another reason why canned leuches are great is then they're already pitted. So now this is up to a simmer. We're going to take our fourth tea bag and add it to the saucepan. And then just turn it off and let this infuse. I have the tea bag in here. This is making this kind of infusion with the syrup. When that is done, I'm going to pour it back over the lies. Grab my coconut chips and my cold rice pudding and we're ready to serve. You see, it's really easy.

I just took like a little teaspoon of the luchi syrup and it's like delicious and perfumed and tastes like jasmine. I'm going to pour that back over the leuches. All right, so here's the rice pudding. I made this one last night. You can take the tea bags out. And again, this is served chilled. So, we're going to just stir this. You can see how much it's thickened. You want to just stir it just to incorporate any of like the coconut milk that's kind of settled on top. Get it nicely incorporated. And now, it's fun to serve it in a glass. It's such like a neutral tone dessert. I feel like making it a little fancy in a glass is kind of nice. It's a pretty rich dessert cuz that coconut milk has a lot of fat. The rice is

pretty substantial. So, it's like this is not a dessert where you want a very large portion, I think. Now, I'm going to top it with some of the luchy halves and some of the syrup, too. I think some of the luchy syrup, I think, is nice. And then the coconut chips. You don't It's really nice to have the texture from the coconut chips. So, I'm going to give it a taste. And I'm going to taste it without the luchi first. The rice, it's not super mushy and it's not falling apart, but it's tender. There's no crunch. You don't want that like starchy crunch at all. It's kind of refreshing. It has floral notes, the coconut, the light sweetness, really

good. And the little crunch of coconut is so good. Hits, I think, all the flavor notes and texture notes. And is also vegan gluten-free. So, I hope you try it. It's a great recipe any time of the year. It'll keep for a really long time. You could serve it and then serve it a week later. Like, all these things hold in the fridge and the chips just like store them airtight and they'll last for a long time. So, really easy. really delicious. I want to say thank you so much for watching and don't forget to like and subscribe. I haven't even had Have I had breakfast yet? No. Got it.