D.I.Y. Friday: Gluten Free Instant Pudding Mix Recipes

Welcome back to D.I.Y. Fridays: an occasional blog series where we D.I.Y. a basic (sometimes naturally gluten free) recipe (like these for homemade gluten free instant pudding mixes—both chocolate and vanilla) or other ingredient that you otherwise might be inclined to buy. We’ll save you money, and the bother of running to the store for every little thing.

All you need is a well-stocked gluten free pantry, and you can make pretty much anything from scratch. Plus, you can control the amount of sugar. These puddings are much more lightly sweet than the store-bought kind, and even though I have as much of a sweet tooth as the next person, I find packaged store-bought puddings to be simply tooth-achingly sweet.

When I made gluten free chocolate poke cake, I needed an “instant” chocolate pudding. So I came up with the recipe for chocolate gluten free instant pudding you’ll find below, and poured it over that chocolate cake—but it sat there on top. It was thick and rich, like proper chocolate pudding should be. But clearly it was too thick for that cake.

Since it was a D.I.Y., I just reworked the proportions and voilà! But today we’re back to those original proportions, and the pudding is perfect…for just being pudding that is ready in an instant.

About milk and nonfat dry milk

You can use whatever milk you like to make the pudding, but if you use a nondairy milk, I find that the pudding is a bit thinner even when using nice, thick almond milk. Nondairy milk is usually not quite white, either, so the vanilla pudding will be a bit off-color (only literally, though!) if you use it for cooking the pudding.

I have used blanched almond flour in place of nonfat dry milk in the chocolate pudding, as it’s just a wee bit, and it worked fine. But I’m doubtful that it would work as well in the vanilla pudding as the dry milk is such a major component of that pudding mix. If you try it, though, let us know how it goes!

A note on thickeners

I know you were probably expecting cornstarch as a thickener, rather than my gum-free gluten free flour blend. But I rarely use cornstarch as a thickener, particularly something I am going to serve chilled, as it tends to “leak” liquid.

That ruins both the texture and the visual experience. You can use sweet rice flour in place of my simple basic gum-free flour blend, but I do prefer the blend. The sweet rice flour creates a better texture in warm mixtures than in chilled, but it will work better than cornstarch.

In simple recipes like these that have as few as 4 ingredients, making a drastic substitution is really like creating a brand new recipe. So substitute at your own risk!