Wow- thank you- I can sure use this! Trish in SC

My favorite puddings are Tapioca and Royal Chocolate Fudge. I only like cooked puddings. I don't like instants that you just mix with milk. We have a pudding company in Long Island called "Cozy Shack." They make very good puddings, including Rice Pudding and Tapioca. My mother used to buy the pearls you have to soak. Too much trouble,I think.

Macerate your fruit and cook down the juices to a thick syrup BEFORE BAKING. Just mix all the sugar and anything else together with the fruit and let it sit (in the fridge) for a couple of hours (I do it up to 24 hours with a firm fruit such as apple) and then drain off the juice, set the fruit aside, and reduce the juice until it is as thick as honey. Put the fruit in the pie as usual and add the reduced-to-syrup juice back in and bake as usual. When making an apple pie, I also par-cook the apples. I've done apple pie that way for almost 50 years - it was taught me by an aunt after repeated goopy apple pie failures. Recently I discovered there is science behind this method (parcooking the apples) - it "sets" the apple so it won't get much softer in the pie. This is why I have for decades been able to make great apple pie using MacIntosh apples, which according to common knowledge are supposed to reduce to applesauce in a pie. They don't if you parcook them. They do get a little softer than most other varieties when cooked in a pie, but not unacceptably or even noticeably so unless you are doing a side-by-side comparison. Anyway. I wouldn't parcook the berries as I think they may be too soft to be treated that way, but do drain off and reserve the juices and reduce it to a syrup. You should need little or no thickener. As for grinding up tapioca pearls, you can do that - but I would use a spice grinder or coffee grinder (which of course has never seen a bean) - making sure the grinder is thoroughly cleaned out (run some rice through it several times and wipe out well to clean out any spice residue). A food processor just won't do a good job. As someone else mentioned, you can find tapioca flour in an Asian grocery, but it could have any of several names: Tapioca flour Tapioca starch Cassava flour Cassava starch Yucca flour Yucca starch Seems to me there is another additional possible name which I am forgetting, but hopefully that will cover your bases. They are all exactly the same thing. I bet you could have found arrowroot powder somewhere also, that is often used as a thickener. Oh, and I just looked it up - Tapioca/yucca/cassava starch/flour is sometimes labeled as "arrowroot" even though it isn't from the arrowroot plant. SO that's probably the 4th possible name I was trying to remember.

DC, I realized the Bob's Red Mill pearls weren't going to be as large as the truly large pearls. But I thought that product would be an alternative to those who seemed to be having problems locating any larger pearls in the first place and also having problems preparing the imported ones correctly. Since Bob's claims their "Small Pearl Tapioca is used to make traditional old-fashioned tapioca pudding, an all-American favorite dessert.", I thought perhaps the preparation would be closer to what some people were remembering. I use instant tapioca about once a year when I make rhubarb sauce, and that's it. I know it's terrible to confess, but if I ever get the hankering for tapioca pudding, I just pick up some Kozy Shack from the grocery store -- usually a couple of times a year, especially when I'm sick. Your savory versions sound intriguing, though.