Unbelievable Chocolate Pudding

Or pie filling or frozen treat!

Aug 02, 2025

Not an original recipe, though we’ve tweaked it quite a bit. The recipe comes to me courtesy of my thirteen-year-old granddaughter and namesake, Meg. Try as I might, I can’t find the source, or rather, I’ve found a dozen possible sources. This is one of those things that’s been bouncing around the WFPB community for a while in various forms. You know, like the flaxseed eggs. Who knows who wrote the original?

Our first version of this came out a little bit too thick. I cut back on the chia and then it came out a little thin. The version below is my closest try yet, with just that extra tablespoon of soy milk.

I have not yet tried it with the cinnamon. Wanted to get the texture down before I started messing with the flavor. I’ll add the cinnamon next time.

But the ingredients are few, the outcome is luscious, thick, and tasty. The consistency is just like tapioca due to the swollen chia seeds.

In addition to the items counted by the app I used to make the nutrition label, (below the recipe) are the benefits they don’t add to labels.

Each serving has a little more than 1 tablespoon of chia seeds. (1.3 actually.) That brings generous amount of protein, and an even huger amount of fiber. Most of the carbs in chia come in the form of fiber. There’s fat in seeds, of course, but when you eat the whole seed, the fiber is designed to mitigate the fat. The whole seed works as one healthful unit. Unlike seed oils, which have all the healthful stuff stripped away and only the fat is left. This is why the word “whole” is in whole food, plant-based.

Here are the chia seed’s micronutrients, the ones they don’t list on nutrition labels: An ounce of chia seeds contain:

23% of your Daily Value (DV) of Manganese (Supports metabolism)
20% DV Phosphorus (Bone & tissue health)
29% DV Copper (Heart health)
29% DV Selenium (Metabolism, immune system, thyroid health)
23% DV Magnesium (Muscles, nerves, bones, blood sugar, blood pressure)

We usually sprinkle chia seeds on our morning oatmeal to start our day with all these boosters.

EASY AS PIE
CHOCOLATE CHIA PUDDING AND PIE FILLING

Ingredients

1.5 cups + 1 tablespoon soy or almond milk
½ cup chia seeds
¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
5 tablespoons maple syrup
½ tsp vanilla
½ tsp cinnamon (*optional)
Pinch sea salt

Method

Couldn’t be simpler and that’s why I love it. Just mix all the ingredients together in a bowl that has a tight fitting lid. I used the mixer the second time, as the first time it separated a bit. So give it a good mix, then cover and refrigerate for 24 hours.

FREEZE IT!

I didn’t have any popsicle-freezer trays, so I used two tiny containers, filled them with pudding, and popped them into the freezer last night. Let’s see if it froze. Yes, but it froze pretty hard, so I’ll let it stand for just a few minutes out of the freezer before serving it for dessert tonight

Other Applications

Use this in any way you would use chocolate pudding, so if you have a graham-cracker crust you can fill it with this, top it with aquafaba whipped topping and have a suitable substitute for a chocolate cream pie. Or you can make a layer cake and spread this between the layers, or inject it into pastries, donuts, or cookies as a filling

This stuff has a lot of uses!

Enjoy!