Crème brûlée recipe - Impressing guests and building skills

Basic crème brûlée, ready to serve
Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2011, all rights reserved

One of the advantages of being a TV chef is that you generally have access to every kitchen appliance and gadget known to man. Most of us who cook at home for friends and family simply don’t have all of the high tech gear we see on shows like Iron Chef.  There are, however, a number of inexpensive gadgets that we can accumulate over time, which can help us to prepare and present our dishes like a TV chef or like a top quality restaurant.

For example, if you watch many cooking shows, you’ve undoubtedly seen one or more TV chefs using a torch. Although it is possible with considerable practice to use a blow torch from the tool shed to achieve the same effect. The size and extreme heat of such a large torch makes it unwieldy, dangerous, and difficult to control, especially for delicate dishes like the restaurant dessert classic crème brûlée.

Sifting through the infrequently used remnants of up my high school and college French classes, crème brûlée translates simply as burnt cream. In fact, it isn’t the cream that’s burnt at all, but a thin layer of sugar sprinkled on the top after the custard part of the dish is complete.

Crème brûlée is one of those dishes that you’ll often see on a fine restaurant’s dessert list, but is seldom served at home. If you want to get a reputation for cooking like a TV chef, however, taking the time to master a basic crème brûlée is a good step in the right direction.

Here’s my very basic crème brûlée recipe. It never fails to delight guests and visiting family. Even my teenage son told me “That’s pretty good, Dad.” Which coming from a boy who would choose to eat nothing but Ramen noodles and tacos if allowed to choose his own menu, is very high praise indeed.

There are two things I recommend adding to your kitchen for this dish, both of which are very inexpensive, but can make a real difference to the dessert. The first is some small porcelain ramekins. These little oven-safe serving dishes can be picked up at most good kitchen supply stores for, at most, a couple of dollars each. You’ll need enough to match the number of people being served, of course, and a spare or two in case of accidents. These can be used for many dishes and are especially useful for appetizers, tapas, desserts, or the latest TV Chef fad - the amuse bouche.

The second thing I recommend is a small kitchen torch. These torches run on butane which is sold in easy-to-use recharging canisters for about $3 each. That three bucks worth of fuel will run the torch for a dozen or more meals. The torch itself may run from $20-30 and should last nearly as long as the rest of your kitchen. If you don’t have a torch yet, don’t worry this recipe includes an alternate method for burning off the sugar using your oven’s broiler.

I’m also going to provide alternate ingredients, one set of things in the average kitchen, and one set the way a TV chef might do it. Just bear in mind this is a basic crème brûlée, there are ways to change it up and many of the TV chefs would put their own spin on it, but you can bet, they learned the basic dish before they started messing around with it. Many, many restaurants will serve it just like this. Chefs de France at Disney’s Epcot Center for example, charges $7.25 per serving, but, of course, you can charge your family whatever you think the market will bear.

 Ingredients:

3 cups heavy cream

2 teaspoons vanilla extract -- or 1 vanilla bean

6 egg yolks

½ cup light brown sugar (granulated sugar can be used instead)

6 tablespoon granulated sugar, for finishing- See Step 7

Water – for heating, not used in recipe

If you have vanilla beans in your pantry, then by all means use that, otherwise the vanilla extract will be fine.

Step 1 -Vanilla bean option

If you are using the vanilla bean place it in a small saucepan with the 3 cups of heavy cream, bring to a boil, remove from  heat allow to sit for 10 minutes.  Remove vanilla bean. Stir in ½ cup light brown sugar until completely dissolved.

Step 1 -with vanilla extract

Bring 3 cups heavy cream to a boil. Stir in two teaspoons of vanilla extract. Stir in ½ cup light brown sugar until completely dissolved.

Step 2 -both versions

Remove from heat.  Allow cream to sit for 15 minutes while whisking egg yolks. When yolks are finely whipped, stir into cream mixture. Mix thoroughly. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Step 3 – Here’s where it gets a little tricky. Pour the mixture into small shallow ramekins (as shown in the photo).  This recipe should fill 6-8 small ramekins depending on the size of each one.  Place the ramekins in a large pan or casserole dish. They should not touch the edges of the larger container. Then carefully add hot water to the larger dish, outside the ramekins until it is about ¾ of the way up the side of the ramekins.  It may be easier to place the baking pan in the oven first so that you don’t spill it or flood water into the ramekins as you move it. It’s important to use hot water to start so it gets up to oven temperature as quickly as possible. The water bath helps to heat the contents of the ramekins evenly so the consistency is, well, consistent throughout.

Step 4 – Close the oven and allow to bake for 30-45 minutes. Check starting at 30 minutes to see if the liquid has set. It should be more solid, but should still wiggle like jello in the middle. Ovens vary in temperature as will the hot water’s starting temperature. These and other variables make the baking time an inexact science. As a rule, I suggest always trusting your own eyes instead of timers. Timers can help, but should not be the sole arbiter of when a dish is complete.

Cooking Like a TV Chef Tip: Use the time while the dish is baking to clean the dishes used in the earlier steps and to give the cooking surface and stove a quick wipe down. Preparing a beautiful dish and having the kitchen already spotless when it is served is doubly impressive to your guests! You’ll never see a pile of dirty pans on the counter behind Martha Stewart when she’s on TV!

Step 5 – Very carefully, remove the ramekins from the water bath. Do you best not to allow any of the water into the ramekins. If some does get in, don’t worry, you can gently wick it up with an absorbent paper towel.

Step 6 – At this point, you need to cool the crème brûlée. Give it a few minutes on a heat-resistant counter top to begin cooling. When it has cooled to the point where you can pick them up bare-handed without burning yourself, you can place them in the refrigerator, uncovered. It will dry out a bit more and firm up nicely.

Everything up to this point should be done at least three hours before the crème brûlée is to be served.

Step 7 – About a half hour before serving, remove the crème brûlée from the refrigerator. Sprinkle granulated sugar over the surface of each crème brûlée. You’ll want each one to be lightly covered in sugar. Some bare spots, especially around the edges are ok. The amount of sugar to be used for each one will vary according to the size of your ramekin. Don’t go too thick with the sugar.

Step 8 – This step can be done in the kitchen out of site of the guests, or in the dining area. I recommend that you don’t try it on the dining table itself, but place the ramekins on a small side table. With the ramekins in a baking dish, use your torch to melt the sugar on top of each one. You should be able to see the sugar melt and appear to form little bubbles of liquid. Be careful not to get too enthusiastic with the torch, you want a very light brown color, not a scorched black or dark brown. You can always flame them more, but you can never flame them less once they are scorched.  Keep the torch moving slowly around the surface of the crème brûlée as you melt the sugar, don’t let it linger in one place.

A real TV Chef would keep up a light banter with the guests during this step. Even though it may take every ounce of concentration to keep from setting fire to the table linens, do you best to make it look effortless, as if this is something you’ve made a thousand times before. As I mentioned before though, it’s perfectly acceptable to do the torch-work in the kitchen out of view of the guests. Especially if you’re going to dress them up further after torching.

Once they are all properly torched, they are ready to be served. The sugar will cool and recrystallize almost immediately, so there’s no need to worry about anyone getting burned. That’s one reason we cool the crème brûlée before finishing it.

If you don’t have a crème brûlée torch, you can still serve crème brûlée. Preheat your broiler, and pop the ramekins under it on the top rack to melt the sugar. This is a little trickier as you really have to watch it carefully. It will likely take only about three minutes to melt and color the sugar appropriately. Again you should be able to see the melted sugar which may look like little water drops on top of the custard.

Optional finishing step:  You can serve the crème brûlée as is, or you can dress it up even further. Choose from a few seasonal berries with a tiny dollop of whipped cream, a thin oblong slice of banana, or a hint of lemon zest sprinkled on top to personalize the dish (you can even sprinkle the lemon zest before adding the sugar topping so it will be “cooked” into the crystallized sugar).  If you’re adding any of these extra finishing steps, then it may be better to take care of the torching and finishing in the kitchen instead of at table-side.

Crème brûlée is a classic gourmet dessert. It has few ingredients, but is a fairly technical dish to cook. It requires you to pay attention to the consistency while baking, handle the ramekins carefully while they are filled with liquid and being placed into hot water, and it requires a delicate touch and a good eye to melt the sugar topping correctly. It’s a dish that must be mastered if you want to Cook like a TV Chef, and one that will help you build your kitchen skills while impressing your guests.