The Kitchen · № 01
Crème brûlée à la vanille
The custard was first written down in 1691. The vanilla is the part we are responsible for.
Where this comes from
The earliest written crème brûlée appears in François Massialot's Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois of 1691: egg yolks and milk, a pinch of flour, sugared on top and burnt with a fire shovel heated red.
Vanilla is not in that original. It became the signature of the French version later, and the dessert found its second life in the restaurant dining rooms of the 1980s. What follows is that French classic: the version vanilla earned its place in.
François Massialot, Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois, 1691Ingredients
- 500 ml double cream
- 1 Ox & Orchid vanilla pod
- 6 egg yolks (large)
- 60 g caster sugar
- A pinch of fine salt
- About 6 tsp caster or demerara sugar, to burn
Method
Split the pod down its length and scrape the seeds. Put pod, seeds and cream in a pan. Bring to just below a simmer, take it off the heat, cover, and leave it 30 minutes; an hour is better. This is the recipe. Everything after it is assembly.
Heat the oven to 100°C. Sit six shallow ramekins in a deep roasting tin.
Whisk the yolks, the 60 g of sugar and the salt only until they combine. Do not whip air in; foam bakes into bubbles.
Rewarm the cream to a bare simmer, then pour it onto the yolks in a slow stream, whisking. Strain through a fine sieve into a jug. Skim every bubble from the surface: a strip of kitchen paper laid on top and lifted takes them with it.
Pour into the ramekins. Add hot water to the tin to come halfway up their sides. Bake 45 to 60 minutes, until the edges are set and the centre still moves as one piece when you nudge it, like the skin of a drum. It firms as it cools.
Lift them out, cool, then chill at least 4 hours; overnight is better.
Sprinkle a thin, even layer of sugar over each. Torch until it goes amber: past gold, short of black. The bitterness is the point, it is the counterweight to the cream. Eat within twenty minutes, while the glass is still glass.
The grader’s note
Two things separate a good brûlée from a great one, and neither is the sugar. The first is infusion time. The second is temperature: 100°C sounds too low, and it is not. A custard sets from around 80°C, and every degree past that is insurance you do not need. One more thing: rinse the spent pod, dry it, and bury it in your sugar jar. In a fortnight you have vanilla sugar and you have wasted nothing.
Made with
Grade A Indonesian planifolia.
Every recipe here is written for a real bean: graded, signed, and sold by weight.