Okay, I can see you scratching your head from here and saying, isn’t every custard gluten and grain free? No, it most certainly is not. This is an old fashioned cornflour STYLE of custard, usually made with wheaten (see that word) or maize (can’t eat that either) cornflour. And doesn‘t it look delicious!

Ingredients
Makes enough for two as a main thing, for four as a drizzle over the pudding thing.
10g tapioca starch (flour)
2 eggs
30g erythritol or sugar if you prefer
vanilla, I used this fabulous ground vanilla from the Sunshine Coast
2 cups almond milk (or milk of your choice)
So, before we begin, let us discuss the whole you can’t make x, y, z with almond milk because it will split. Yes, we have discussed this before, you most certainly can make custard with almond milk, there you go, the proof of the pudding is in the photo, see? You just have to be gentle with it, no ferocious boiling, especially for this as we have the eggs to bear in mind too.
For any custard of this type there is one really important trick I am going to show you so that you know when to whip it off the heat so that it is thickened, but not so thick that you end up with manky curdled sweaty egg mess.
Ready? Okay, here we go.

Into our pot, tapioca starch, erythritol, eggs, vanilla, give it all a good whisk, please notice also that I am using a medium sized pot, which gives me a bigger surface area on the hot plate.
Off to the side set a large jug with a coarse sieve on top.
Whisk the milk into your egg mix, turn the heat on, I used heat three of nine, so a lowish heat, too low you will be there forever, too high, scrambled eggs, so the low side of medium is good.
Now take a look at this photo, this is what I was talking about earlier. See the bubbles in the mix?

This is what will tell us when this custard is ready to come off. So we keep it moving, and moving, we feel the weight of the custard, we watch the bubbles.
Okay, let’s have another look.

Nope, see the bubbles? When this custard is thickened and ready to come off its relative viscosity will be too high for it to hold a bubble like that. Keep stirring it around with your whisk, no frothing, just keep it moving so the egg proteins don’t knit and make scrambled eggs.
Okay, it is starting to thicken, I can feel a resistance to the whisk, let’s have another look.

Yes, that is better, getting very close, keep going but keep a really close eye on it now.

Good, nice, look at the edge of the pan, see how that custard creeping up the sides is no longer thin and liquid? See how there are no large bubbles, only some tiny ones that even as this photo was taken, the custard was refusing to have anything to do with? We pause now in our whisking, is there a sign of movement on the surface? An attempt at a simmer? Yes, then off it comes and through the sieve into the jug.
One of my lecturers at trade school, Tommy, used to tell us, chefs dont use whisks (?) and chefs don’t sieve their custard, well I do, look here at these little blobs of egg protein, Tommy can chew on those if he wants to, but I have no interest in having egg blobs in my custard. Running it through the sieve also cools it a little and halts the cooking process, so we are hedging our bets here.

Okay, so there you have it, a gluten, grain, dairy, sugar free custard. Now, what are you going to do with it?
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