How do you eat your pudding?
When I was little, I was absolutely obsessed with Tong-Yi pudding (a famous brand of store-bought pudding in Taiwan). I remember always using those square plastic spoons that came with it at the convenience store, eating the pudding layer by layer. I mean that quite literally. I’d gently shave off one thin layer from the surface, then the next, and the next. While working through each layer, I’d try my best to make sure there were no visible dig marks between one spoonful and the last. When I reached the boundary between the custard and the caramel, I’d insist on keeping that final yellow layer completely untouched by any caramel. Then, when it came to the caramel itself, I’d eat the curved edges first before finishing off whatever remained in the center.
All that effort just to get a perfect cross-section — smoothing out any stray marks that dared to appear. Why go to all that trouble? I don’t think it was simply because young me had nothing better to do. It was more of a reluctance to let it be over. Pudding didn’t show up in our house very often, and whenever this rare guest appeared in the fridge, it deserved to be treated with care to make the happy memory last a little longer.
Growing up, pudding milk tea was a game changer. I’ve realized that I might actually love it even more than bubble tea.
Unsweetened milk tea paired with pudding — rich, smooth, and just the right amount of sweet. Unlike bubble tea, which demands chewing effort and offers little control over how many bobas you get per sip, pudding milk tea is far more gentle. It sips beautifully, with the pudding-to-tea ratio feeling just right.
Last weekend I was invited to a potluck. The host said we didn’t need to bring anything, but if we wanted to, something sweet would be welcome. My eyes lit up and I turned to Sam: “Should we make pudding from scratch?” He seemed less excited than I was, but I managed to talk him into it. Neither of us had ever made pudding before, so to avoid serving guests a failed batch, we did a test run following MASA’s recipe. Watching the mountain of sugar pour in, I thought this pudding was going to be devastatingly sweet. Sure enough, the first batch was so sweet it gave me an actual stomachache. The version we brought to the potluck used only 70% of the original sugar, which was still a touch sweet but at least no longer stomach-wrecking. Honestly, I think 50% of the sugar in the custard itself would have been just right. On top of that, since our pudding molds were a different size from MASA’s, the baking time had to be extended significantly. Making desserts really does come down to the tiniest details. The tiniest difference throws everything off.
Also, what surprised me most was the taste. After making it ourselves, I discovered that homemade pudding and store-bought pudding are quite different: the caramel in homemade pudding doesn’t form a distinct separate layer the way store-bought pudding does. It’s more liquid, pooling at the base. The custard itself is intensely rich and fragrant, with a firm, dense texture that’s not so easy to scoop through. Come to think of it, store-bought pudding is soft and almost mushy, and the flavor is nowhere near as deep.
You don’t know what real pudding tastes like until you’ve had the real thing, and only then do you realize that store-bought pudding isn’t really pudding at all. It just looks like one.
This feels surprisingly applicable to relationships too. Some people are store-bought pudding; some people are homemade pudding. Homemade pudding gives you love that’s genuine — real milk, real eggs, real sugar. But some puddings look every bit the part, shaped perfectly in their little molds, while having none of the substance that pudding should have (fun fact: store-bought pudding contains no fresh milk or eggs whatsoever). If you’ve only ever had store-bought pudding, you might think that’s just what pudding is. But once you encounter the homemade kind, you realize that what you had before wasn’t pudding at all.
So the next time someone is being insincere with you, you can quietly mutter under your breath: “You store-bought pudding.” (Please don’t actually do this.)
That said, the next time I’m back in Taiwan, I’ll probably still grab a store-bought pudding and wash it down with a pudding milk tea — because they’re convenient, and because they carry just enough nostalgia to bring back a little of my youth. I just probably won’t be eating it so painstakingly carefully anymore. One spoon, straight to the bottom.
Here’s a photo of our test batch of pudding:
NB: This article was first published in Chinese on 02/28/26. It was later translated with assistance from AI tools, edited by me, and published in English on 05/01/26.