Rice Pudding with White Wine Fig Reduction

A Fig-alicious Dish
October 10, 2020
Rice Pudding with White Wine Fig Reduction
Pg. 222
Andrew, Season 3
44 down…55 to go!

Fig-alicious Dish. Fig-alicious Dish. Fig-alicious Dish. (Dish, dish, dish, dish, dish, dish…)

Y’all are gonna have Fergalicious stuck in your head for the rest of the day. I’m sorry, I just can’t resist a good pun these days.

I chose this dessert specifically because I was invited to join an amazing group of Instagram foodies doing a “Fall Into Dessert” collab to celebrate National Dessert Day, but with a Fall theme. I ran to my MasterChef Junior cookbook and picked the most Fall-ish dessert I could find. The figs and cinnamon in this recipe felt Fall-ish to me, even though it’s not your normal pumpkin spice dessert.

Also, I am excited that this collab falls on the day I introduce the makeover over at @cooklikeatid. After months of being inspired by amazing food photographers and stylers on IG, I spent this last week working on creating new, DIY backdrops to up my photography game. I can’t wait to continue to grow in this newfound hobby of mine, and share some amazing photos with y’all!

What did I do differently?

The original recipe includes a verjus reduction. If you’re like me, you’ve never heard of verjus before. It’s essentially a very young white wine with no alcohol in it. It’s kind of expensive and difficult to find… so I just substituted white wine (I don’t mind the alcohol ;P In fact, I poured myself a glass as I made it).
The recipe called for dried black and white figs, but Central Market only had dried black figs. I bet it was just as good with only the black.
The instructions said to put the arborio rice in a pressure cooker with the risotto setting on. Unfortunately, my cooker doesn’t have a risotto setting, so I had to make the rice the hard way… constantly stirring the milk (for about 45 minutes). It was kind of therapeutic, but definitely time consuming.