Sugar free Junket, historic milk pudding dessert with strawberries

Junket must be the most basic pudding there is, no starch or gelatine involved, making it a perfect dessert for Vegetarians and Celiac disease sufferers.

 This Junket recipe  is also sugar free, sweetened with natural zero calorie stevia sweetener, which makes it suitable for stage 3 of Candida diets.

Earlier this year I got bitten by the bug to want to make my own stuff like my parents did when I was little. I am getting fed up with store bought products that have an endlessly long list of strange unspeakable ingredients in them.

I am pedantic about knowing what I am putting in my body in the quest to practice perfect dammage control in all areas of my life. How lucky we are that the internet has a large host of recipes and ideas to improve life and food.

Now, I have been testing a lot of ice cream parlours that have established themselves as part of dairy milk farms. Most of them also sell a few other products like milk, raw and  pasteurized, cream, yogurt , cheese and meat.

Raw milk is great, all the goodness is still present, and if the farm works cleanly, there is no problem with getting ill. I certainly have never gotten ill from raw milk. As a teenager I worked on a farm for 2 weeks and pretty much lived off raw milk.

However – if in doubt about Raw Milk, pasteurise it beforehand.

So I got my husband exited about making our own milk products last weekend. He made Halloumi style cheese, I made Yoghurt and Junket.

 

Flavour/ Texture

The flavour of the Junket is delicate, milky and sweet. The sweetness, comes from the milk itself and the added Stevia-sweet I used instead of sugar. Make it as sweet as you like with the help of  Stevia-sweet all natural healthy sweetener .

You can add an aromatic note with a Vanilla pod or any other flavouring you desire.

The texture is a bit like set yoghurt, breaking apart easily. Now, mine had a lot of bubbles on the surface, that was thanks to me pouring the milk that suddenly got too hot from one jug to another to cool it back down.

When making Junket you use Rennet to get the milk to set. Rennet is a digestive enzyme which curdles / coagulates the milk. Originally Rennet was extracted from the stomach (the abomasum) of young, unweaned calves.

Nowadays, you can get a vegetarian friendly option Vegetable rennet. It’s an alternative made from plants that have coagulating properties.

 

 

Makes approx. 4 portions

Prep time: 15min

Setting time in fridge: 2-3hours

 

You need:

• 1 Liter full fat whole Milk, preferably Raw Milk
• 1 teaspoon Vegetarian Rennet or animal based Rennet
• Thermometer for checking milk temperature.
• 1-2 knife-tips Stevia-sweet 90% powder dissolved in 1 table spoons hot water

Note: getting the sweetness to the desired level is a matter of trial and error, the best thing is to start with a smaller amount of whatever Stevia you have on hand, it can be ready-use, liquid or tabs (need to be dissolved too), adding more is easier than diluting – you could end up with a huge amount of treat -Don’t have any Stevia yet? – you can always use normal sweetener products until you are set up.

 

 

Instructions:

Warm the milk to 40 Celsius checking with  a candy thermometer, this needs to be exact! If the temperature is any higher, the enzymes will loose their setting properties and the milk will stay liquid.

Add the Rennet and the Stevia-sweet, stir gently, if you go vigorously you’ll get the milk foam I had on my junket from the continuos pouring.

Pour into a bowl or individual bowls and place in the fridge for setting. Make sure your fridge is not next to the washing machine – that will shake the Junket to bits if it is on during the setting period.

Check after a couple of hours if the Junket has set, prepare some seasonal fruit and serve on the day of making —if the junket is left to stand it will become curdled and separate from the whey.

 

Tips:

-the first time I tried the recipe it did not set, I just got a bit of curdling of the milk. That recipe called for the rennet to be mixed with water, which I did not do this time round following another recipe.

Note, how to  find ingredients:

– Liquid rennet (regular or vegetarian) are sold in some supermarkets ( I found the VegeRen in Sainsbury’s on baking isle), health food stores, and cheesemaking supply online stores.

– You can find your nearest Milk producer that sells RAW Milk to the public on: http://www.naturalfoodfinder.co.uk/unpasteurised-raw-milk-uk

– Or you can get it delivered by post from a variety of producers- check here.

 

The nurtition will depend on which milk you use.

The average energy calories per 100ml of whole milk is 66 kcal so the  total for the recipe would be 666 kcals.

Here a chart showing how different breads of cows produce different levels of milk fat, resulting in different calorie densities.

Milk fat percentages

Cow breed	Approximate percentage
Jersey	5.2
Zebu	4.7
Brown Swiss	4.0
Holstein-Friesian	3.6

 

Get stuck in making your own historic dessert and let me know how it turns out for you.

MK xx