Why pudding not setting

Both homemade and store-bought puddings generally contain starch. Placing your spoon, which has traces of saliva on it, back into the pudding transfers small amounts of saliva into your pudding. Your saliva then begins the process of breaking down the starch molecules in the pudding. Since these starch molecules absorbed water molecules when the pudding was made, your pudding becomes watery as the starch molecules are broken down and forced to release the water molecules. You can avoid this chemical process by dishing a portion of pudding into a smaller bowl rather than eating it straight out of the pudding container.

You should also always use a clean spoon to dish the pudding up. Syneresis is the extraction or expulsion of a liquid from a gel. In the case of your pudding, a gel molecule that has absorbed a water module releases this water molecule. Similarly, when making a pudding at home, people often use gelatin to set the dessert.

Gelatin powder turns into a gel when it absorbs water. There are a couple of reasons why the gel in your pudding is expelling its water molecules. The first reason is temperature. Some starch-based gels get looser when they are subjected to warm temperatures.

Vigorously whisking the pudding—or any custard with a generous amount of butter—breaks down the fat into tiny droplets that are too small to detect once the mixture cools. All egg-based custards can curdle if they are cooked for too long, or at a high temperature. A low temperature and constant stirring are important to prevent the custard from curdling. The grainy texture is caused by the proteins in the egg yolk clumping together.

Also, when custards are overheated, the egg proteins over-coagulate and grainy curds occur in the cream — or, what you feel as a grainy texture in the pumpkin pie filling. A small amount of cornstarch or flour added to the recipe helps with this. The grainy texture you see in the cream is where the fat molecules have stuck together. Make sure that you stir the cream well before using it.

The cream should whip, but unfortunately it may not loose all of its graininess and if it has been frozen once then it should not be re-frozen after whipping. I'm thinking it'll get even thicker once it sets in the fridge. However, it turns soupy instead. I've tried two different recipies and the same thing happened with both.

Once it sits in the fridge for a while, it loses it's thickness and turns to soup. Thank you. O'Shaughnessy When the usual pie lineup feels boring and uninspired for your dessert repertoire, you've got to make Sign up for our newsletter to receive the latest tips, tricks, recipes and more, sent twice a week.

The first one is a result of cooking techniques, and the other one is due to a lack of knowledge about how ingredients react with each other. The most common mistake in making dessert puddings like chocolate cake or any cream puddings is undercooking.

In other words, cooking a pudding means heating it through and through, which will kill all harmful or unhealthy bacteria present in it. If you see that your pudding is soft and has started to fall apart, it means that it needs more cooking time. You can avoid this by checking whether your pudding is ready to get out of the oven in time before it reaches that point.

The over-cooking stage comes with a different problem called under baking, resulting in a rubbery pudding.

As you can see, knowing when to take your puddings out of the oven and allowing them to cool down enough so that they do not overcook are two key elements in learning how to make a good pudding. This phenomenon is based on chemistry principles that dictate that if you add one type of liquid in our case, milk into another eggs , you get a third type, which is the mixture of both. This is in addition to the layer which will be on top of your puddings, and you can only get rid of it by cooking your puddings well enough or putting them into soup bowls before serving if they are not cooked all the way through.

You can either thicken pudding by thickening the liquid you use or thicken it by adding something that starch is made out of.