Some time ago we dealt with the question of how to calculate the caloric value of Śnieżka powder - today we will deal with another frequently asked question: "How many calories does pudding powder have?"
Despite how difficult it is for many people to determine the caloric value of custard powder, the answer is simple, and the bigger problem is determining what is custard and what is not.
Pudding is a milk-based dessert thickened with starch or potato flour. The simplest pudding powder is simply potato starch – starch is a pure carbohydrate, containing essentially no fat, protein, or sugar, approximately 85% starchy carbohydrates, and 350 kcal per 100g of dry matter.
So if you use regular pudding and its ingredients only include starch (potato, corn, tapioca – it doesn't matter) or potato flour, you can safely assume that the caloric value of this pudding powder is 350 kcal per 100g and that it contains about 85g of carbohydrates. And in fact, the vast majority of puddings on the market are just starch with flavoring and coloring, which have no impact on the caloric value!
How to calculate the caloric content of dry custard powder?
So where do the difficulties in determining the calorie content of pudding stem from? It's the mental gymnastics that creative manufacturers put us through when they provide nutritional values for the finished pudding after adding milk and sugar in their nutritional tables—they usually assume you'll use 2% fat milk and add 30g of sugar for the entire package of pudding. If you follow this formula, there's no problem—but what if you want to use 0.5% fat milk? Or 3.2%? Or oat milk? Or you want to sweeten the pudding with a sweetener instead of sugar? Then it turns out the information provided in the table is useless, and you have to really scramble to calculate the calorie count of the pudding powder itself.
Another challenge is desserts that are called puddings—but aren't actually puddings. These include single-cup desserts like "Sweet Moment," "Healthy Moment," "Pleasure Moment," oat porridges called puddings, and so on. These "puddings" (not puddings) often have very complex ingredients, and the nutritional values are listed per serving of the finished dessert, meaning it's difficult to extract the nutritional value of the powder itself if you want to use it in a way other than the manufacturer's intended use.
Below we have collected examples of puddings and their caloric content, broken down into protein (a tiny amount), fat (a tiny amount) and carbohydrates – carbohydrates dominate the macro distribution of pudding powders, and there is nothing wrong or surprising about it, but it is worth paying attention to the difference in sugar content, because in some puddings, producers force sugar on us under the name pudding – the record holder among the pudding desserts we analyzed contained as much as 50% sugar!
