Healthy Pudding, Custard & Flan Recipes

Chia seeds are a good source of healthy omega-3 fatty acids, plus they have fiber, iron and calcium. Here they're mixed with a fruity base and refrigerated until the chia seeds expand to form a thick, creamy texture similar to tapioca. Pudding for breakfast? We're in.

When you have a craving for a comforting dessert, try this pudding cake, which forms its own rich-tasting sauce as it bakes. The coffee flavor is subtle, but it adds complex depth to the cake's flavor.

This inverted caramel custard dessert is often found on Mexican dessert menus. This recipe is low in calories and fat.

Creamy avocados make this dairy-free and vegan chocolate dessert recipe super-rich. Serve as a not-so-sweet dessert or with strawberries for dipping.

Brooke Siem baked with grandmothers around the world for her Grandmother Project, including with Sofy in Buenos Aires, where she learned this Argentinian take on bread pudding. It tastes like a magical mashup of French toast, cheesecake and flan. The caramel is made directly in the pan you bake the pudding in (one less dish to wash!), so you’ll need a metal cake pan or pie plate. Sofy uses Wonder Bread, but any soft white sandwich bread will produce luscious results. Learn more about this recipe and other recipes Siem learned as part of her project in the article How Cooking Connected One Chef with Grandmothers Across the World.

Need a sweet dessert for a group of six? Try this yummy pudding recipe and serve up individual ramekins full of fresh blueberries with a decadent brown sugar and cornmeal topping.

Made with nonfat milk, this comforting rice pudding (delicious for breakfast, too) has a lovely creamy consistency because Italian arborio rice is used.

This silky apple dessert recipe--a spiced apple bread pudding made with apple cider in place of the usual custard--gets a double hit of apple flavor from both the cider and plenty of sliced tart apples. Mace, the lacy red spice that coats the nutmeg fruit, adds a particularly lovely floral note, but you can substitute nutmeg if you don't have any mace on hand.

This rice pudding is dairy-free, but the bananas and rice milk make it so creamy and rich-tasting, no one will know the difference.

Every panaderia (bakery) in Puerto Rico has many flavors of flan, from vanilla to guava. Reduced-fat cream cheese gives this version a rich, comforting texture.

We use low-fat milk along with nonfat Greek yogurt in the creamy custard for this peach pie. The yogurt gives the custard a smooth texture without using cream or too many egg yolks. A slice is just as delicious served warm from the oven as it is chilled. For an added treat, serve topped with fresh blueberries.

This cake was inspired by the one of the most popular Jamaican desserts, sweet potato pudding. Traditionally, raw shredded sweet potatoes are used, but we found that sweet potatoes sold in the U.S. don't provide the same texture as those in Jamaica. Instead, we mix mashed sweet potato with eggs and flour to get a slightly different, but equally delicious, cheesecake-like result.