Four small bowls of creamy rice pudding, two dusted pale tan with Ceylon cinnamon and two dusted darker red-brown with cassia, a thin papery cinnamon quill resting on the table beside them

Cinnamon Rice Pudding With a Ceylon Stick and a Cassia Finish

September 26, 2026

"Cinnamon" on a label can mean more than one bark, Ceylon or one of the cassia types, and one good way to learn the difference is to cook both in the same dish. The spice company Burlap & Barrel describes its Ceylon cinnamon, Cinnamomum verum, as less sweet and spicy than its Vietnamese cinnamon, and more citrusy and complex. This rice pudding gives each bark its own job. A Ceylon stick steeps in the pot for the whole cook and sets a soft, warm base. Then, at the table, two bowls get a dusting of ground Ceylon and two get ground cassia. One pot, about an hour, and the difference ends up on the spoon.

Two barks, and how to tell them apart

The stick gives it away. The BfR, Germany's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, describes a Ceylon stick in cross-section as looking like a cut cigar, with several fine layers rolled up together, while in cassia a relatively thick outer layer forms a small roll. Under the bark, the two share a backbone. In published analyses, cinnamaldehyde leads the essential oil of each, at about three quarters of one C. verum bark oil and about 85 percent of one Chinese cassia (C. cassia) oil. Flavor is what the two-bowl finish tests. The harvest behind the Ceylon quill is in the spice harvest guide, and the full reference on both species is Cinnamon: The Complete Guide.

Ingredients, for four

100 g (1/2 cup) arborio or other short-grain rice
240 ml (1 cup) water
1 Ceylon cinnamon stick, about 8 cm (3 in)
1 wide strip of orange or lemon peel, no white pith
1 pinch fine sea salt
1 liter (4 1/4 cups) whole milk, plus 120 ml (1/2 cup) extra at altitude
65 g (1/3 cup) sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract, or a quarter of a vanilla pod, split (optional)
For dusting: ground Ceylon cinnamon, such as Burlap & Barrel Cinnamon Verum (shop Burlap & Barrel Cinnamon Verum), and ground cassia, such as Burlap & Barrel Royal Cinnamon (shop Burlap & Barrel Royal Cinnamon), a Vietnamese C. loureiroi

Method

Start the rice in water, with the stick. Put the rice, water, cinnamon stick, citrus peel and salt in a heavy saucepan. Bring to a boil, lower to a simmer, and cook uncovered, stirring now and then, until the water is almost absorbed, 8 to 10 minutes. The stick goes in now, with the heat, and stays for the whole cook.
Add the milk and go slowly. Pour in the milk and bring it back to a bare simmer over medium-low heat, with small bubbles at the edge and never a rolling boil. Cook uncovered, stirring every few minutes and scraping the bottom where milk likes to catch, until the rice is soft and the pudding is loose and creamy, 30 to 40 minutes.
Sweeten late. Stir in the sugar and the vanilla and cook 5 minutes more. Stop while the pudding still flows off a spoon. It sets as it cools, so a pudding that looks finished in the pot will be stiff in the bowl.
Rest. Take the pan off the heat, remove the stick and the peel, and let the pudding rest 10 minutes.
The two-bowl finish. Divide among four bowls. Dust two lightly with ground Ceylon and two with ground cassia, a pinch each, sifted through the fingers from a height. Taste one of each back to back. Burlap & Barrel describes its Ceylon as more citrusy and complex and its cassia as sweeter and spicier; see whether the difference holds over the milk.

In Denver, and anywhere high

According to the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, water boils at 212°F at sea level, and the boiling point drops by just under 1°F for every 500 feet of elevation. At Denver's mile, that works out to roughly 202°F, so a simmer runs cooler. Colorado State University Extension notes that liquids also evaporate faster at elevation, and that foods cooked by simmering need more time. For this pudding, expect step 2 to run longer; judge by the rice, not the clock, and keep the extra half cup of milk warm beside the stove. Add it a splash at a time whenever the pot tightens before the rice is soft. The altitude cooking guide takes the same problem through the rest of a Denver kitchen.

Why it went wrong

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Scorched, brown flecks, a bitter note	Heat too high, or the bottom went unscraped	Heavy pan, bare simmer, scrape every few minutes. Do not stir the scorched layer back in; pour the pudding into a clean pot
Rice still chalky at the center	A cooler simmer at altitude, or the milk went in too early	More time and more warm milk; let the water stage finish before adding the milk
Set solid in the fridge	Cooked until it looked done in the pot	Stir in cold milk a spoonful at a time until it loosens; next time, stop while it still flows
Cinnamon tastes dusty or faint	Old ground cinnamon	Replace the jar; see the guide to whether spices expire

Notes and variations

Only ground Ceylon in the cupboard? Skip the stick and stir 1/2 teaspoon of ground Ceylon in with the sugar in step 3. Other steeps: the same stick-in-hot-milk method carries over to a pot of drinking chocolate (see the drinking chocolate guide), and the fat-and-heat reasoning behind it is in the guide to toasting and blooming spices. Buying the right bark: the cross-section tell above is a quick check on a stick, and the wider range of single-origin spices is covered in the single-origin spice guide.

The two dusting cinnamons here are Burlap & Barrel Cinnamon Verum (shop Burlap & Barrel Cinnamon Verum) and Royal Cinnamon (shop Burlap & Barrel Royal Cinnamon). Products ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com, and visitors to 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, can ask staff questions in the shop.