Cardamom rice pudding

We recently purchased a jar of ground cardamom after seeing a suspiciously low price at Whole Foods, of all places (maybe it's not real cardamom??).  For the first time using it, I wanted to make something that would showcase the spice as opposed to making something like a curry where it would be combined with several other spices.  I finally settled on a rice pudding recipe from Joy of Cooking and used a 1/2 teaspoon of cardamom where the same quantity of vanilla had been called for.

There are two basic rice pudding recipes in the cookbook; there's the baked rice pudding, and then there's the stovetop version.  Here's how we decided to go stovetop:

"Should we do stovetop or baked rice pudding?"
"Hmm....."
"The stovetop has fewer ingredients, but--"
"Stovetop."

Fewer ingredients made it easier to get everything together, but at the same time it meant a less-flavorful finished product.  The only flavorings in the pudding were milk and white sugar, so it was similar to a fior di latte gelato.  The recipe said to add the vanilla (cardamom, in our case) after removing the pudding from the heat, but I wonder if adding the cardamom with the milk would have done more for the overall flavor, almost like steeping chai in milk instead of water.  Substituting brown sugar for white could also have added a little depth of flavor, as well as adding just a pinch of cinnamon.  I realize that I'd specifically wanted a dish where the cardamom would be the main flavoring, but a little more flavor would not have hurt.

Too much milk.

The other issue was the amount of liquid in the recipe.  I had to cook 3/4 c. of rice in 1 1/2 cups of water, which is much more than I would usually use for rice.  Once the rice was cooked, I had to then add 4 cups of milk.  The photo above was taken more than a half hour after adding the milk, whereas the recipe claimed that the pudding should only need about 30 minutes of cooking.  It probably took about 45 minutes for the pudding to cook down into, well, a pudding.  Good thing I didn't have to cook that night.*

Yum.

For a little extra flavour, we added sliced honeycrisp apples and a dusting of cardamom to the serving bowls, but a drizzle of honey or a sprinkling of cinnamon would also be tasty.




*We actually went out for dinner that evening to Masala Pakistani and Indian Cuisine in North Providence, RI.  Going out for dinner is a big, big deal for us since we strongly prefer cooking our own stuff.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 820
Writeup background noise: The Herd with Colin Cowherd on ESPN Radio.  All ESPN is talking about these days is some football game being played on Sunday, but as far as I'm concerned, football season ended two weeks ago.