Mom's Reisauflauf, Remixed The rice casserole my sister kept stealing from the fridge

My sister audits food like a border official. Ingredient lists get read twice, textures get questioned, and anything uncertain earns a polite no thank you before it ever reaches her plate. So when she came to visit me in Sài Gòn and I caught her going back to the fridge for the fourth time in a single day – spoon in hand, no plate, no ceremony, just quietly excavating the cold rice casserole I’d baked two days earlier – I knew something had gone very right.

Because that never happens.

It’s a Reisauflauf. A baked rice pudding, more or less, though pudding undersells it and casserole oversells the effort. My mom used to make it when I was a kid, somewhere out in the Bavarian countryside, and this is my version of hers – same bones, lighter body. Less butter, less sugar, and the raisins mostly shown the door.

What makes it float

The trick is the egg whites. You beat them stiff and fold them into the still-hot rice right at the end, and in the oven they do exactly what they do in a soufflé: trap air, puff, hold. Mom’s was denser, heartier, the kind of thing you’d eat before a long walk in the cold. Mine came out lighter almost by accident, and then I chased that lightness on purpose. Less fat, less sugar, more air. A cloud that happens to be full of apples.

The part that surprised me

I brought it to work.

My Vietnamese colleagues are, let’s say, discerning about rice. I expected the polite-skepticism treatment – a small taste, a diplomatic nod, a quiet return to their own lunch. Instead they finished it and asked what was in it.

Jayden has explained to me why this is a bigger deal than it looks. Vietnam is not short on sweet rice – chè, xôi, sticky rice folded into more shapes than a coconut has any right to enable. But rice boiled in milk, enriched with butter, baked together with apples? That doesn’t map onto anything in the local canon. It reads as faintly alien. Dairy and rice don’t share a pot here, and apples aren’t exactly dropping off trees in the Mekong Delta. So when people raised on the actual rules of Vietnamese rice tell you the strange European milk-rice thing is good, it lands differently than my sister caving in front of the fridge. Different skeptics, same verdict.

The apples are not the law

Apples are just the reliable core. Firm, a little sweet, they keep their shape through the bake and cut the richness before it tips fully into dessert. But I’ve wandered off the path more than once. Rum-soaked raisins on one occasion – the boozy ones earned their place back, no argument. Fresh mango on another, which gave it a tropical lean and a shorter shelf life, since mango doesn’t keep the way apple does.

Reach for whatever firm sweet fruit you like. I’m fairly sure a chocolate version is out there somewhere, waiting for someone braver than me on a random Tuesday night. The belly’s imagination is the limit.

The recipe

Serves a small crowd, or one determined sister over several days.

Ingredients

• 250 g rice
• 1 l unsweetened milk
• 1 pinch of salt
• 2 teaspoons vanilla essence, or 2 sachets of vanilla sugar
• 60 g butter
• 80 g sugar
• 4 eggs
• 5 medium apples

Method

1. Cut the apples into small pieces – whatever size you’d actually want to bite into.
2. Wash and parboil the rice.
3. Separate the eggs. Set the whites aside, keep the yolks ready.
4. In a large pot, combine the parboiled rice, egg yolks, milk, salt, vanilla, butter, and sugar. Mix the yolks in completely before anything heats up, or you’ll scramble them. Bring it to a boil, then simmer on low for 10 to 20 minutes, stirring often – it burns the second you stop paying attention – until it turns creamy. Kill the heat.
5. Fold in the apple pieces.
6. Beat the egg whites until stiff, then gently fold them into the still-hot mixture. Gently is the whole point.
7. Pour everything into a prepared casserole dish and bake at 180°C, convection with top and bottom heat, for about 45 minutes.

Serving and keeping it

Eat it warm with applesauce, a dusting of cinnamon sugar, or nothing at all – it holds up plain. But keep some. It survives days in the fridge, and this is the part my sister worked out before I did: it might be better cold. Something happens on the second day. The sweetness settles, the texture tightens, and it becomes the kind of thing you eat standing up with the fridge door open, spoon in hand, no plate, no ceremony.

Ten times I’ve made this now. Ten times it has vanished the same way. I’ve stopped calling that luck.