Creme Brulee Recipe
The French know how to do dessert. From truffles to dessert wines, their after-dinner treats bring the word "delicious" to mind and bring a sense of indulgence to life. Crème brulee is classic French dessert that doesn't disappoint most fans of French cuisine. Combining custard with a carmelized layer of sugar, crème brulee combines textures and tastes to create a dessert that is simultaneously light and sinful.
You don't have to be a French chef to be able to bring this taste to your table. You just need to follow a basic crème brulee recipe which begins with learning how to appropriately carmelize the sugar that goes on top of the treat. Once you've learned that trick, you can easily make crème brulee in your home. And once you've learned how to make the basic crème brulee, you can add your own twists to it to impress the people you invite to dine with you.
Here's a basic crème brulee recipe including how to carmelize the sugar properly:
o Gather your ingredients. Luckily, you don't need too many different ingredients to make a good crème brulee. French desserts may taste like their filled with liquid sunshine and other obscure ingredients but they're really very simple. What you'll need for the crème brulee is:
o Heavy cream
o Egg yolks
o Granulated sugar
o Light brown sugar
o Vanilla pods
o Gather together the additional materials that you'll need. Besides the ingredients, you'll need:
- Clean kitchen towel
- Ramekins (small ceramic dessert cups that the crème brulee is cooked and served in)
- Large roasting pan
- Sauce pan
- Propane blowtorch for kitchen use
o Preheat your oven to 300 F.
o Prepare your roasting pan by layering it with the clean kitchen towel. Place your ramekins inside the pan atop the towel; don't let them touch each other.
o Mix cream, salt, sugar and vanilla beans in the sauce pan. Heat until sugar is dissolved and the mixture begins to boil slightly. Remove from heat and cover. After fifteen or twenty minutes, add additional cream to the mixture to cool it.
o Mix the egg yolks together with this cream mixture. Add an even amount of cream and yolk, mixing until the mixture is a light cream (custard) color. Strain. Pour into the ramekins.
o Boil water. Pour the boiled water into the roasting pan so that it reaches nearly to the top of the ramekins that are inside. Bake approximately forty five minutes, until the edges are crusty and the centers are beginning to get solid. Remove from heat and let cool.
o Once cool, add sugar to the top of each ramekin. This is where the trick of carmelizing the sugar comes in. You'll need to light your propane blowtorch and hold it to the sugar. You should be able to see when it has carmelized. If you've done it correctly, you're crème brulee is almost ready to eat. You just need to let it cool off and then sit down to enjoy it!
That's the basic crème brulee in a nutshell. Once you've tried your hand at a few times and become confident with making it, you can begin to experiment a little bit to give it new flavors. Add fruit on top, dark chocolate on the side or a dessert wine that perfectly compliments and you'll almost feel like you're on vacation in France.
*Note: This basic recipe came from the Wiki Cookbook. You can go here (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Cr%C3%A8me_Br%C3%BBl%C3%A9e) to see the exact ratios and detailed directions for creating this crème brulee.
