Sütlaç

Sütlaç

In Turkish: Sütlaç, a blend of süt (milk) and aş (food). In Hebrew it is written “סוטלאץ’”. Turkish rice pudding is the everyday dessert found in every muhallebici (milk-dessert shop) on a Turkish street, in small clay cups, cold from the fridge.

What sets sütlaç apart from European rice pudding is one step at the end: the cups go into a blazing-hot oven or under the broiler until a burnt-brown crust forms on top. This version is called fırın sütlaç — “oven sütlaç” — and it is the more common one. The crust is not decoration: it adds a caramel layer of flavor that balances the softness beneath it.

It is also the only Turkish dessert that can nutritionally be called “everyday” — about 210 calories per cup, with protein and calcium from the milk, compared with about 205 calories in baklava, which are almost entirely sugar and fat.

Prep time: 15 minutes · Cooking time: 40 minutes · Broiling time: 20 minutes · Chilling time: 3 hours · Yield: 8 cups · Difficulty: easy

The muhallebici: a shop where the whole menu is made of milk

Turkey has an entire kind of shop dedicated to milk desserts — the muhallebici — and sütlaç is just one item on its menu. Alongside it stand muhallebi (a milk-and-starch pudding, the parent of the whole family), keşkül with almonds, kazandibi — a pudding whose bottom is deliberately burnt in the pan and rolled inward — and tavuk göğsü, a milk pudding containing fully shredded chicken breast fibers that tastes nothing like meat. No mistake here: the most famous dessert of the Ottoman palace is built on chicken breast.

What unites the whole family is that its base is milk and starch rather than cream, eggs or butter. That is why Turkish milk desserts are low in fat compared with equivalent European desserts — a serving of crème brûlée contains many times as much fat — and they provide protein and calcium along the way.

Ingredients (for 8 cups)

• 1 liter whole milk (3%)
• 100 grams short-grain rice (sushi or risotto rice)
• 250 ml water
• 150 grams sugar
• 3 tablespoons cornstarch (corn starch)
• 1 packet vanilla sugar or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• A pinch of salt
• Cinnamon for sprinkling when serving — optional, but customary

Choosing ingredients and substitutes

Short-grain sushi or risotto rice works; the rice sold in Israel as “Persian” is usually long-grain and is not the choice here. The corn starch is white cornstarch, not yellow cornmeal. A regular packet of vanilla sugar of about 10 grams or a teaspoon of vanilla extract suits the recipe.

Method

1. Cook the rice in water. Rinse the rice well and cook it in a cup of water over low heat for about 15 minutes, until the water is absorbed and the grains are completely soft. Cooking it separately in water, not in milk, is the detail that keeps the milk from scorching on the bottom.
2. Add the milk and sugar. Add 800 ml of the milk and the sugar, and cook over medium-low heat for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
3. Thicken. Mix the cornstarch into the remaining 200 ml of cold milk until there are no lumps, and pour it into the pot in a thin stream while stirring constantly. Cook for 4-5 minutes until the mixture thickens to the texture of a thick sauce — it will thicken considerably more as it cools.
4. Season with the vanilla and a pinch of salt and turn off the heat.
5. Pour into heatproof cups — ceramic or clay — up to about 2 cm from the rim.
6. Brown the tops. Arrange the cups in a deep baking pan, pour boiling water into the pan up to two-thirds of the height of the cups (a water bath), and bake under the top broiler at 220-250 degrees Celsius (430-480°F) for 15-20 minutes, until brown spots form on the surface.
7. Cool completely and move to the fridge for at least 3 hours. Sütlaç is served cold.

Nutrition facts and calorie estimate

The recommended serving is a cup of about 150 grams, one-eighth of the recipe.

A comparison that illustrates the gap between desserts: a cup of sütlaç and a square of baklava have a similar number of calories (210 vs. 205), but sütlaç provides 5 grams of protein and 160 mg of calcium and only 4 grams of fat, while baklava provides 11 grams of fat and almost zero protein. If you are looking for a dessert to end an everyday meal, that difference matters.

What does deserve attention is the added sugar: 19 grams per cup is about three-quarters of the recommended daily limit for added sugar for a woman. Cutting the sugar in the recipe to 100 grams works well and brings a serving down to about 185 calories and about 12 grams of sugar — it still tastes sweet, because the milk itself contains lactose.

Variations and tips

• Vegan version: soy milk works best of the alternatives, because its protein content is close to cow’s milk and it forms a similar crust under the broiler. Almond milk will give a thinner result; see the comparison of plant milks.
• No broiler: skip the baking step and you get unbaked sütlaç, which is also served that way in Turkey — cold, without the crust.
• Toppings: in Gaziantep they sprinkle ground pistachios on top, and in Istanbul cinnamon.
• Lumpy starch: always mix the starch into cold milk before adding it to the pot. Starch that meets hot liquid directly forms lumps immediately.

Summary

Sütlaç is a dessert based on two cheap ingredients — milk and rice — that gets its character from a layer of burnt caramel formed in two minutes under the broiler. About 210 calories per cup, with protein and calcium, which makes it the most reasonable way to end a meal in Turkish cuisine. Baklava is reserved for special occasions, and the Persian counterpart — a rice dessert without milk — is sholeh zard. More recipes in Turkish cuisine.