Dehydrating: Rice Pudding

I love my mum's rice pudding; just the thought of it makes me feel cosy and warm. So I'm hoping that feeling is reinvoked when I go out on a longer tour I have planned this summer (more on that at a later date) where I expect there's a good chance that I'll be cold and wet!

I've never dehydrated rice pudding before – any pudding come to that – so this is a step in a new direction. I used a recipe I found on the internet which sounds quite like my mum's:

(For 6 portions it reckons)
1.2 L (2 pts) milk
140 g (5 oz) pudding rice
110g (4 oz) caster sugar
ground nutmeg

The recipe also said to use a "good knob of butter" but I left this out because I've read that fat doesn't rehydrate nor keep so well.

I put it all in a saucepan on a relatively low heat so that the milk didn't burn on the bottom of the pan.

Mmm, rice pudding in the making!

It took ages to reach a boil! The Norwegian way of making rice pudding (risengrøt) is to just keep it simmering until it ends up as puddingy as you want it. My mum usually boils the milk with the rice to soften the rice and then puts it in a dish to bake in the oven. I baked mine, but think it would be quicker for dehydrating purposes to just keep it on the stove top. Putting it in the oven did mean that I could go out for a walk though!

Mmm, another photo of rice pudding...

Letting it cool when it's out of the oven meant that the rice soaked up the rest of the milk, so then I could put it on the dehydrator. It was pretty sticky and I don't have any dehydrating sheets (teflon I think) so I used baking paper with plenty of gaps in between so that there was enough air circulation.

After a few hours I peeled the rice pudding off the strips and broke them apart to finish drying.

A stack of rice pudding, not, I repeat, not, scrambled eggs.

And the finished result:

And here's one I prepared earlier...

I'll probably break it up more before taking it hiking :)

BackpackingChef.com is a fab resource for dehydrating fruit, vegetables, meals and, hurrah! for rice pudding, so I used his guidelines to dehydrate mine for five hours at 125 F, which is 52 C. Mine needed more but I suspect he has better results using a sheet rather than just putting the pudding on the trays. He also has a useful guideline for rehydrating the pudding:

one cup of rice = 3.5 cups of cooked rice = c. 1.75-2 cups dried rice pudding.

Packing this all away I had just over 350g of dehydrated pudding. I'm hoping that this will be a nice addition to my backpacking meals; time on the trail will tell!