Cooking Lessons Learned the Hard Way - Episode 1

Posted by E-George on May 22, 2007

The Lesson: Unless an instant pudding is engineered as vegan, or lactose free, then it’s very likely that the pudding mix relies upon the milk sugar, lactose, to create the proper chemical reaction to provoke basic pudding solidification.

How to Learn It The Hard Way: Make some sugar-free fat-free instant Jell-O vanilla pudding using unsweetened lactose-free soy milk.

My Logic: I was attempting to find a clever method by which to decrease the fat content, further decrease the sugar content, and add some protein value to the pudding by using unsweetened soy milk in exchange for fat-free cow’s milk. As it turns out, the material densening process never fully occurred, leaving behind a moderately bland, sluggishly viscous material that smelled like vanilla pudding but tasted like soy milk. Slightly gritty soy milk.

My Attempted Cover Up: Using my handy-dandy cherry pitter, I pitted some fresh cherries and scattered them over what can only be described as a thick vanilla bisque. Then, I handed a bowl to Matt with as cheery a smile as I could muster and hoped for the best. Being the dutiful man he is, he ate it. Fortunately, he was working on a project on the computer, so I’m not sure how much he actually tasted since his brain was otherwise occupied. I ate some, too. That’s not fair to say, actually. I picked the cherries off the top and smeared the remaining “pudding” around to assess its fluid dynamic properties.

Real World Application of Error: A fire retardant slurry.

Filed Under: Que bummer - Comments:



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