Dulce de Leche Roasted Banana Pudding

Baking for Friends

I got a text from Neighbor Thomas last week.

“Do you make banana pudding? Have someone with a birthday next week if you’re interested.”

To which I responded, “I haven’t, but I could!”

I don’t really like bananas all that much, although I could be persuaded to change my tune after that daiquiri, but I never say no to Neighbor Thomas.

When he asks for a dessert sometimes I get to make cake for Webby. And sometimes I inadvertently help him cheat to win an award. And sometimes I end up baking Skynet cake.

A Non-Traditional Banana Pudding

Fortunately, Thomas is not a traditional dude, so I didn’t feel obliged to make a traditional banana pudding.

I asked on my PCO Facebook page how folks make their banana puddings, and I got some really great ideas.

Gary, who bakes extraordinary pies, offered a version with a “salted caramel sauce” in the topping along with some cream cheese, and that got me thinking about dulce de leche, especially after another friend mentioned using sweetened condensed milk in her banana pudding.

How to Make Dulce de Leche

As far as I’m concerned, the primary reason for owning cans of sweetened condensed milk is to make dulce de leche.

I like mine to be super thick and very darkly caramelized, so here’s how I do it:

• Put a can or three into a large pot in water deep enough to cover them by about an inch
• Turn on the heat and when the water reaches a boil,
• Keep it at a low boil for three hours, making sure to add water when necessary to keep the cans submerged.
• After the time is up, let the cans cool down in the water.
• Boil yours for half the time if you still want your dulce de leche to be pourable. It will not be as deeply flavored, but it will still be tasty!

Video Tutorial: Making Dulce de Leche from Sweetened Condensed Milk

You can watch Chef John make pourable dulce de leche on YouTube.

Roasted Banana Pudding: The Components

Once I had the dulce de leche, my next thought was to roast some bananas and put them in my custard, because I don’t understand using vanilla pudding to make a banana pudding.

Why not layer in as much banana flavor as you can? Really commit to the banana pudding.

The resulting flavor of the pudding was lovely–sweetly banana-y and dulce-ish. Really good.

The next consideration was the cookies.

Cookies are a vital part of the whole structure of banana pudding. They’re there for textural contrast, although most folks like them to soften up in the pudding somewhat.

After long and serious consideration, and after I realized that I did not want to purchase vanilla wafers as I had a whole crate of Lorna Doone shortbread cookies here, I decided to throw caution to the wind and deviate even further from the standard by losing the Nillas and going with shortbread.

I highly recommend this course of action. The shortbread is nice and buttery and a bit more savory than vanilla wafers, and they worked beautifully.

Tips for Success

A couple of caveats before I share the recipe, friends. Because I want you to be successful and Not Curse.

• Take the labels off the cans of sweetened condensed milk and clean off all the glue before setting them in your pan to boil. Otherwise, you will end up with a ring of glue around your pan, and it will be Very, Very hard to get off. If it does happen to you, scrub really well with baking soda. (That’s what worked for me. The glue just laughed at my hot, soapy water).
• After you roast your bananas, puree them in a blender and then smoosh them through a strainer. It will be easier to do now than it will be if you wait and try to strain after you make your custard. If you do throw caution to the wind and wait, don’t use your fine strainer because the banana goo will just get stuck in all the wee openings and you will be very sad.

More Old-Fashioned Desserts You Might Enjoy

If you’re a fan of pudding and custards and other old fashioned desserts, consider these options, friends:

• Old-School Butterscotch Pudding
• Lazy Peach Sonker
• Shoo Fly Pie

High Praise for This Roasted Banana Pudding

This is the text I received from Thomas on Wednesday morning:

“Your dessert was a hit again! You’re a legend at the DOT.”

Mission Accomplished.

I do hope you give this pudding a try. The dulce de leche adds a subtle yet complex caramel note that is really rather sophisticated and plays really nicely with the bananas.

The Difference Between Dulce de Leche and Caramel (For Those Who Care)

While many people refer to dulce de leche as caramel sauce the two are very different from each other. Granted, they taste similar and even look similar, but they take two very different paths to get to their finished state.

Caramel sauce derives the majority of its flavor and complexity from the caramelization of sugar, namely glucose and fructose, the two sugars that make up table sugar, or sucrose. Once the cream is added, you might simmer it for awhile, but the milk sugars in the cream never really get hot enough to brown.

Dulce de leche, on the other hand, starts with both sugar and milk together, so not only are you getting flavor from the caramelization of sugars (glucose and fructose from the sugar and lactose from the milk), you’re also getting additional complexity through the Maillard reactions that occur when amino acids (from the milk proteins) are exposed to heat.

To my palate, dulce de leche is both mellower and more complex than caramel. It has a nice roundness of flavor that fills up your mouth and doesn’t have the bitter edge that caramel has.

Please don’t misunderstand—I love a bitter-edged caramel sauce; I’m just pointing out the differences between two equally lovely sauces/confections.

And there you have it. I hope you enjoy the pudding!

Thanks for spending some time here with me today. Have a great day.