Creme Brulee Part II started with a trip out to see Matt Bower, a French cook, demo how to skip the mistakes we made last time. It is clear three areas beat us. We beat our egg yolks for 3 minutes with a mix master -- mistake number one -- too much air. We let our cream get too hot, mistake number two. We didn't temper the egg yolks well enough.
Armed with all of this knowledge, we went back to the kitchen.
Having watch chefs used the vanilla bean and extol the virtues of heavy cream, Duncan started to crack eggs again, the heavy cream and vanilla by our side. We revised our original recipe so that we were making less volume, but the ingredients were about the same proportion.
We use the Aunt Bonnie rule with food – that is, if we make a mistake, it is OK and no use mourning when the whole egg gets dropped in with the separated egg whites. Either fish it out or start again – what is the cost of an egg when a person is learning to cook.
We used the method we had seen on utube, even to filling the ramekins close to the stove and pouring the hot water bath in, so that we didn’t make a mess as we carried it to the oven. Perfect crème brulee. We should have taken a picture.
And the blow torch? A big wow to the carmelized sugar on top. One of the methods had called to use a finer sugar on top of the ramekin, so I cleaned out the coffee grinder, and ground some white sugar into a finer form. I am a good sous chef. Duncan had seen the cook knock the sides of the ramekin to get it to spread evenly, so that worked out perfectly. Only the last two of the portions didn’t get done?
“Why?”, I asked
“My fingers are a little raw anyway and I got the blow torch too close to this hand,” he said, raising his fingers for me to see. That is fine. Seven out of nine finished beautifully.
I am calling that 100% on learning how to do creme brulee.
Arta
Sounds like me and Moya with the hit glue gun working on David's Yoshi costume. Ow. I burned myself again. Ow. How could I have done that twice in a (ow) row?!!
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