Tapioca

There's no problem this super creamy, make-ahead pudding can't solve.

If you love the texture of chia pudding, it gets even closer to bubble tea with the addition of tapioca pearls here.

You’ll want something crunchy to go with the soft pudding. Pistachios are just the start! Choose any nut or seed you like.

This textured tapioca pudding recipe was inspired by ice cream and gets its concentrated dairy flavor from milk powder.

In this bubble tea recipe, cherries and hibiscus turn the drink hot pink. You can use other teas to make flavor variations, the options are endless.

With loads of juicy blackberries and an easy lattice crust, this may just be the world’s most perfect pie.

This easy tart cherry pie recipe highlights the sweet-tart fruit and has a wonderfully flaky double crust.

Our favorite recipe for strawberry-rhubarb pie gets a crumb topping with cinnamon and brown sugar and a flaky, buttery bottom crust for the best of both worlds.

Made with sweetened black tea, milk, and black tapioca pearls, this classic milk tea recipe is sweet, creamy, and delicious.

Deep-fried tofu gets braised with shiitake mushrooms in soy sauce and Chinese wine for this easy dish.

Iced tea with tapioca pearls that are sucked from a large straw are perhaps Taiwan’s most famous culinary export.

Beneath a humble, oaty streusel topping lies a sleek, inky jumble of plums and blackberries—talk about a delicious contrast. A combination of cornstarch and tapioca in the filling helps to keep the colors of the fruit true and to set up their juices nicely without becoming too thick.

Creamy coconut tapioca pudding with glazed pineapple is one of the desserts I obsessed over when I lived in New York City and worked for François Payard. All of the cooks at Payard Patisserie spent our free time talking about the places we dreamed of going and the dishes we couldn't wait to try. One of the cooks told me about how Claudia Fleming, at the time the pastry chef at Gramercy Tavern, had created a dreamy tapioca that could not be missed. He was right—on one of my last nights in NYC, I was finally able to try it, and thereafter every time I went to visit NYC, I made a point of going back to order it again. Sadly, it's no longer on the menu, but I've channeled it here in this version. It's light and refreshing and uses the natural sugars of mango, pineapple, and apple juice to complement the richness of the coconut milk.

Tapioca, like semolina, is one of those things that a school kitchen could have turned you off for life. I couldn't eat it for years, having been force-fed it at primary school aged six, with tinned jam, as it oozed like frogspawn out of the bowl and I wept and retched. For years I had the same malicious feeling toward beets and mashed potatoes, which were instant and came in lumpy granules. My teacher and I had a silent war every lunchtime; a war that eventually came to an end after my parents removed me from the school. Made to your own wont, in your own kitchen, tapioca is ambrosial, and worth being a grown-up for, as is semolina. This could also be a pudding, not a breakfast, just don't serve it with dog food–like tinned jam. Try a lovely homemade compote instead.

Take full advantage of summer’s bounty with this luscious pie that needs only 40 minutes of active prep time. Choose the ripest seasonal berries from the farmers’ market to create the gooey filling—the tartness of blackberries will perfectly mix with the sweetness of sugar and tapioca.

Fresh currants are one of summer’s overlooked treasures. They are just as adaptable to baking as other more common berries, such as blueberries and raspberries. In fact, naturally tart currants are often paired with those sweeter berries for a perfect balance of flavors. Here, red currants and raspberries are tossed together and baked in a double-crust pie liberally sprinkled with sanding sugar. It’s exactly the type of dessert you want to make—and eat—after a visit to a farmers’ market or roadside fruit stand in high summer.

The local tradition of purple pies began sometime in the 1960s with Al Hodges, who commissioned Irene Bouchard to make a unique grape dessert for the Redwood Restaurant in Naples. Forty years later, thousands come to the village of Naples to celebrate the grape harvest and sample the native grape pies. The robust flavor of Concord grapes makes this unusual pie a treat. You will have to peel each grape, but the delicious results are well worth the effort.

I feel sorry for people who tell me that their mother’s cooking was terrible: I can’t imagine eighteen years of eating bad food. Fortunately, my esteemed lineage included a mom who was a fantastic cook. Unfortunately, though, she was lacking the baking gene, so cookies and cakes were few and far between. She did, however, make wonderful tapioca pudding, which she served warm in a bright-red ’60s-style glass bowl. She always added an entire capful of aromatic vanilla extract to the pudding, stirred in at the last minute. Being hopelessly nostalgic (especially when it comes to desserts), I can still smell it to this day. Of course, back then there wasn’t much fusion cooking going on, but nowadays Thai coconut milk is readily available, and I use it in my version of tapioca pudding. In addition to vanilla extract, I include a vanilla bean for good measure. I don’t have any children, but if I did, I would hope this pudding would be just as memorable for them as my mom’s is for me.

One of the reasons comfort foods are such a big part of this book is that in times of stress, it’s natural to seek out foods that have never let you down. So it is with tapioca pudding, a staple throughout the world. The cassava root, which is made into tapioca pearls, is rich in carbohydrates and gluten free, making this dessert a good treat for people who want to maintain weight without taxing the digestive system. A little chocolate sweetens the package, making this an ideal dessert to eat by the fireplace. Be sure to use very high-quality chocolate to enhance the yum factor. You can make tapioca without presoaking, but plan on an extra 10 to 20 minutes of cooking time.

This creamy (yet vegan) dessert can follow a meal from just about any cuisine: Caribbean, Indian, Mediterranean, West African, Asian, North American.…

Maybe I like rhubarb so much because I started eating it when I was a child; my mother’s strawberry-rhubarb pie is one of my earliest memories. And I love summer fruit soups; that’s something I learned from François Payard. So this combination is a natural for me. You need just the pod from the vanilla bean for this dessert, so if you have saved some used pods, now is the time to recycle. And you will need a whipped cream charger (see page 279) for the foam. You will have leftover consommé (which you can freeze) and foam; you simply can’t successfully foam less liquid than is in the recipe.