I wanted to make some tapioca pudding, and my wife asked me to make it chocolate. How on earth am I going to....
This is how I did it.
You will need:
1. 1 cup tapioca pearls
2. 4 cups whole milk
3. 1/4 cup cocoa powder
4. 1/2 cup sugar
5. vanilla extract
6. 1/3 cup water
7. big pinch salt
Pour the tapioca pearls into a large mixing bowl, then add cold water until a couple of inches above the top of the pearls, allowing them plenty of water to soak- don't be worried about adding too much water. Leave in refrigerator at least overnight, but you can absolutely take them out the next evening as well.
Combine sugar, cocoa powder, salt, and the 1/3rd cup water in a large saucepan. Heat over a medium heat, stirring, until boiling. Boil for about three minutes. Add the milk and stir together, continuing to heat. Once the chocolate mixture has reached a temperature that it starts to scald slightly, add the drained tapioca pearls. Continue to stir, making sure to scrape the bottom of the pan (you may want to lower the temperature to medium-low to prevent too much from sticking to the bottom). As the mixture heats, it will slowly thicken and the tapioca pearls will begin to pop up, transparent. When enough have, add the vanilla extract and pour the whole thing into some tupperware and stick into refrigerator to chill.
Let's talk about what I have, and what I would suggest as changes.
Normally, I cook the pearls until they all float to the top, clear. That did not happen here. I continued to cook the mixture for a long time, hoping it would help, but it did not. The longer you cook tapioca, the thicker the resultant pudding it- mine became an extremely stiff gelatin. Which is fine, I enjoy that too. But the pearls were a mixture of clear and cloudy, which means that not all of the pearls were completely done, affecting the texture and the taste in a slightly chalky way.
What would I try next time to address this? I think that I would have the four cups of milk in a separate saucepan, heating with the tapioca. This is not exactly the same as typical tapioca (they would normally have eggs and such) but I am guessing that the cocoa powder is interfering with the diffusion of moisture into the pearls or whatever. Cook the pearls until they are all clear and floating on top, then add that to the chocolate mixture, cook together for a couple of minutes to make sure everything is friendly and intermingled, then decant.
Traditional tapioca pudding has eggs. I left the eggs out with this because I was afraid that adding them would at best result in a mousse-like chocolate, which I did not think would be nice, but that was only if everything worked out nice. If things went wrong, some weird eggy-chocolately concoction sounded disgusting. But you could absolutely make essentially a traditional tapioca pudding (see the previous tapioca recipe posted on this blog) and then add the chocolate. It might work.
I'd like to experiment with this more, but the sheer amount of space it requires in the fridge plus the time takes an eternity. So I will come back and update this recipe as I continue to experiment.
