Banana Pudding with homemade vanilla wafers

Or, how a Southern classic saved my Thanksgiving dessert plans

Hello!

First, I want to acknowledge the ongoing devastating fires in Los Angeles—I’m thinking of my friends and colleagues who live there, many of whom have experienced the loss of their homes and businesses. I hope if you live in LA that you, your pets, and family are safe.

I made this banana pudding over Thanksgiving and have been itching to develop a recipe for you all ever since!

When I go to Oregon every Thanksgiving, it’s become a family tradition to make a banana cream pie like the one at Tartine because it’s my dad’s absolute favorite thing when he and mom come to visit, but as the time was ticking away while cooking and baking on the morning of, I realized I simply didn’t have time to make the pie shell, paint it with chocolate, make and chill a batch of caramel and assemble the pie (how am I 60 and yet feeling like I’m a disappointing 16 year-old?). So I asked dad if there was some other dessert he liked with those ingredients, and he said his grandmother used to make him BANANA PUDDING. DONE! It was delicious and perfect, and made excellent leftovers for two more days. From my mismanagement of time, a new tradition is born.

If you haven’t had it before, banana pudding is southern in origin (dad’s from Kentucky originally), and made with layers of Nilla wafers, vanilla pudding, whipped cream, and bananas and allowed to chill and meld together for a few hours. If you look up the recipe online, you’ll see most versions use box pudding and cookies, evaporated milk, and often non-dairy topping. I can see an argument for buying good gf cookies, but pastry cream is super fast to make and really makes a difference in flavor—and it goes without saying that real whipped cream is unbeatable (ha), unless you can’t eat dairy (in which case possibly one of the not-bad canned coconut milk whipped toppings may work).

I think of these vanilla wafers as the cookie version of genoise, a not-sweet sponge cake which isn’t usually eaten on it’s own but is layered with jams, mousses, and other flavorful components to moisten it and create a composed cake or dessert. Here’s a photo of all of the trials—probably around 20 batches in all, trying out versions with oat flour, granulated sugar, milk, egg yolk, cream, and baking soda. The oat flour turned the cookie an unappealing color, unfortunately. More butter tasted good, but yielded a flat cookie. Sometimes it’s the simplest recipes that put me through my paces.

You can also use these cookies as a base for a crumb-crust like for this cheesecake, or any pie that requires a cookie to make a crust, like Key lime. I used brown sugar which gives them a really nice flavor, and of course, lots of vanilla. Or, just find some store-bought, gluten-free vanilla wafers or sugar cookies, and all you have to make is the pastry cream.

This pudding is among my favorite category of dessert—like Eton Mess, trifle, summer pudding, and even baked Alaska—delicious components that meld together to create something much greater than the sum of its parts. So many of these desserts are from the UK, and as they say there, this dessert is very moreish.

Note: if you noted the lemon in one of the photos, it was to add a few drops of juice to the bowl of bananas to keep them from oxidizing. I didn’t think it made much difference though since they are covered in pudding, so I wouldn’t bother.

Note: you may notice that the weight for store-bought cookies varies slightly from the weight of the cookie dough; this is to take moisture evaporation into account (weights will vary; for a recipe like this, it doesn’t matter).

Tools you may need:

• Glass trifle container - I like this Anchor Hocking trifle bowl that comes with a lid

• You can use gluten-free, store-bought vanilla wafers like these (I haven’t tried this brand, but I have used other products from them and they are generally decent), or any vanilla-type of gluten-free cookie your local grocery carries, such as shortbread, butter cookies, etc.

• Strainer - this set from Cuisinart is nice because there’s no plastic parts and it comes in a graduated set of 3