Did you know that’s it’s really quite simple to make homemade pudding from scratch? Yes, you can make your own pudding with just a few ingredients and only a few minutes of your time! The strategy I’ll be sharing here is a homemade chocolate pudding recipe, because chocolate is probably the most popular of all the pudding flavors, and it’s my most favorite too.

In the past, I often relied on my homemade pudding mix, but this time around I wanted to also have an easy way to make pudding even if I didn’t have any of my DIY mix. After a half-hearted search through the internet looking at pudding recipes, I instead decided to go old school, and retrieved an old cookbook off my shelf, the More-With-Less Cookbook. This cookbook is an oldie but goodie, first published in 1976 by the Mennonites. It has lots of frugal and basic recipes that not only help you make good use of your own food resources but can also make you a good steward of the world’s food resources in general.

And yes I found just what I was looking for – a very basic scratch pudding recipe that I used as my starting point and only had to make a couple of changes (a little less milk and less sugar). I was also amused to see that the only illustrations in the recipe section of this book are of the very familiar little measuring spoons we all had 40 years ago. And guess what? I still have mine and use them almost every day!

And in the old days we got by without many details for our recipes either. The brief details for this pudding recipe were to “combine in heavy saucepan” and then “cook over low heat until thickened, stirring constantly”. No videos, no photos, no helpful hints, just stir it up people, haha.

So here are just a few more details (and a video) from me on what ingredient measurements and methods seemed to work the best for making this homemade chocolate pudding.

Ingredients and Steps To Make Pudding

Step 1: Mix the cornstarch into some of the milk. First measure out a 1/2 cup of the milk and then stir in 2 level tablespoons of cornstarch and set it aside. (Making sure the cornstarch was thoroughly dissolved eliminated some of the weird rubbery globs I had in my first trial batches where I just dumped everything together.)

Step 2: Mix remaining milk, sugar, and cocoa in pan. Next pour 1 cup of milk into a saucepan and mix in 2 tablespoons of sugar and 2 generous tablespoons of cocoa. The cocoa powder will just kind of float around on the top.

Step 3: Stir in the cornstarch mixture. Add the milk/cornstarch mixture to the saucepan. Now all your ingredients are together in the pan and ready to be heated.

Step 4: Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly. As the ingredients heat up, the cocoa powder will finally mix in and the mixture will start to look like a thin hot chocolate drink. But after just a few more minutes the mixture becomes more glossy and begins to thicken. Once it is thick and bubbling around the edges, it can be removed from the heat. The entire heating process takes about 5 minutes.

Step 5: Flavor Add-Ins: Finally, stir a splash of vanilla and a 1/2 tablespoon of butter into your pudding to add extra flavor and richness.

Step 6: Transfer to a bowl or other storage container. I always lay a piece of plastic wrap on the top surface of the pudding to help prevent a rubbery skin from forming. Keep the pudding refrigerated as you use it up.

Enjoy Your Homemade Pudding!

Once again, one of the best things about making your own recipes from scratch is that you can control the ingredients. When I first made this recipe exactly as originally written, it turned out rather thin and too sweet. I could feel I really had a sugar buzz going! So I used a bit less milk to make it thicker, and then with each batch I used less and less sugar too. Finally when I was down to only 2 tablespoons of sugar it tasted best to me. But of course, you are free to add another tablespoon or two of sugar back in if that suits your taste better.

I’ve also used white sugar, brown sugar, and coconut sugar and any of them worked in this recipe. I’ve also used a combo of cow’s milk and almond milk, and that worked OK too. Whole milk will also make a richer pudding.

Feel free to experiment so you can find the combo that suits you best too. It’s all good when you make your own!