Creme Brulee and Flan

This week marked a new twist in my journey with patisserie and baking: I bought a blowtorch.

We were set to make creme brulee in the classroom - and handling the torch for the first time made me somewhat anxious. Of course it did. Who wouldn't find it a little unsettling to hold a can of fire? Especially when you're not sure exactly how far the flame extends - it's not visible past a certain point of blue flame, but it's out there just the same. We used the torch to kill bubbles on the surface of the brulee before it is baked - the classic caramelization that you find on your restaurant dessert happens after the baking and cooling.

It seemed the best way to get over the canned heat fear was to go buy a torch, assemble it and try it out. Technically, I'm not supposed to bring it into the classroom, but at least now I can work with it at home and amaze friends and family with the fireworks.

Creme brulee and flan, or creme caramel (or baked custard if you follow the textbook), are sisters in the custard family, so we also made flan during production. No caramelization on top of the product there, but you do need to cook a sugar syrup to a joltingly hot stage. This caramelized sugar will end up on the bottom of the flan and then present itself when unmolded and flipped upside down.

Chef boldly demonstrated a technique I had never heard of or seen. Apparently in the BCS era (before common sense), the way cooks tested the various stages of cooking sugar was to plunge their hands into a bucket of ice until numb, then gamely reach into the syrup and pull out a piece of liquid. If they could form a ball with their hand, the mixture was at a soft or hard ball stage, and on up into the high ranges like hard crack stage. Too many burns later, we got the candy thermometer.

Neither flan or brulee are difficult to make, but you must pay attention and follow directions. I don't want to say what happened to friends of mine during their first pass on brulee - but suffice it say you should not use a whip and beat your eggs, or you may end up foaming at the mouth.

Here's hoping tomorrow I torch the next exam - a written and three practical exams all in one week, c'est merveilleux. 

Thank heavens I have leftover flan and creme brulee to sweeten the cram.