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We fall in love with a bucket of Japanese custard pudding【Taste test】

Katie Pask Aug 7, 2022
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Something else to check off our bucket (of pudding) list.

It’s no secret that we here at SoraNews24 are no strangers to eating abnormally large amounts of food, whether it be a huge bowl of tempura or a monstrously large cheeseburger. So when our reporter Tasuku Egawa heard a store in Tokyo had started selling giant custard puddings by the bucketload — literally — he rushed there right away.

The store in question was Tokyo’s branch of specialty custard pudding store Purin ni Koishite (rendered by the company in English as ‘I Love Pudding’). It was located in the arcade for Ikebukuro’s Metro station, near the ticket gates for the Yurakucho Line.

The bucket of pudding was a new addition to I Love Pudding’s custard-y line-up and went on sale August 2. Tasuku was sure they’d quickly get snapped up, so he planned to get there as soon as the store opened, but for a number of reasons ended up arriving over an hour later.

Luckily for him, there were still some buckets of pudding waiting for him. On a regular day, the store intends to make around ten buckets of pudding per day, but as this was the opening day the staff had made extra.

Tasuku immediately bought a bucket of custard pudding, costing him 2,000 yen ($14.90) and headed home, ready to get stuck into some creamy, jiggly goodness.

The fact that it comes in a bucket should be evidence enough, but it’s a pretty hefty pudding, weighing in at 800 grams (1.8 pounds). In comparison, a regular custard pudding from a convenience store is around 100 grams, so this bucket is a must-try for any diehard pudding fan.

It was also very tightly air-sealed, as seen in this photo. Tip it upside down and it doesn’t move at all, which was handy as Tasuku had to swing by work before heading home, so the pudding got jostled about in his bag a fair bit. But it didn’t budge a bit!

▼ The pudding also came with five sachets of sauces to drizzle on top.

But the time for admiring how the pudding looked was coming to a close, and it was time to get stuck in.

Despite the pudding’s hefty size, Tasuku decided to eat the whole thing by himself (as expected of any self-respecting SoraNews24 reporter). Like most people, Tasuku had always longed to able to boast to his friends, “One time, I ate a whole bucket of pudding” and this seemed like the perfect chance to make his dream come true.

The bucket of pudding came in at a whopping 1,590 calories, but sometimes you have to do the unthinkable to make your dreams come true… maybe he could do an extra workout tomorrow to make up for it.

The pudding looked pretty robust, making Tasuku eager to breach its custard-y surface, so he grabbed a spoon.

As expected, the spoon stayed completely in place. What a sturdy pudding!

After he eventually managed to scoop up some pudding on his spoon, Tasuku could see tiny black grains of ground vanilla bean, giving the pudding a strong vanilla aroma.

He decided to try the pudding first without any of the sauce and was pleasantly surprised. The taste of the pudding wasn’t overly sweet, but that was perfect, as it meant it went well with the vanilla aroma.

Tasuku also gave the pudding’s texture two thumbs up; just the right amount of firmness whilst still being creamy and jiggly.

The pudding was already excellent without the extra sauce, but Tasuku wanted the full bucket of pudding experience, so grabbed a sachet of caramel sauce. How would it go with the mild sweetness of the pudding? Would the sweet caramel sauce send Tasuku’s senses into a sugary overload?

Not at all — in fact, the caramel sauce had something of a bitter taste, which went well with the sweet aroma of vanilla.

Eating from a bucket was fun, but Tasuku wanted to see how the pudding looked on a plate, so he tipped it upside down once more and waited for the satisfying squelch as the pudding slid out from the bucket.

Even though Tasuku had already taken a few spoonfuls of pudding, it still stood firmly on the plate, maintaining its perfect form. As expected of such a hefty pudding!

But herein lied a problem — while he had already established that the pudding was perfectly delicious by itself, Tasuku really wanted to drizzle some sauce on the top. However, the five sachets that came with the pudding didn’t seem like they’d be enough — one sachet was enough for maybe two mouthfuls of pudding, and Tasuku estimated there were around twenty mouthfuls of pudding left.

Luckily for him, the store also sold jars of caramel sauce for 500 yen (US$3.73), and by some miracle Tasuku had been forward-thinking enough to pick some up. Nice!

▼ Now he was free to douse his pudding in delicious caramel sauce.

A huge pudding covered in lashings of caramel sauce was just what the doctor ordered! Well, probably not an actual doctor, who was probably despairing at the sheer amount of sugar and fat that Tasuku was happily gobbling up, but who cares about gaining a little weight when you can dip some creamy custard pudding in a sea of caramel sauce?

If you too wish to douse a giant bucket of pudding in caramel sauce, you can buy both from the Ikebukuro or Kobe branches of I Love Pudding. You can also use their online store, although the bucket of pudding proved so popular that at the time of writing, orders won’t be delivered until September 21 at the earliest.

If the idea of drenching your dessert in caramel sauce doesn’t appeal to you, there are other things you can do with an absurd amount of custard pudding.

Related: I Love Pudding
Photos © SoraNews24
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[ Read in Japanese ]