Challenge Accepted: Crème Brûlée

Per my mom's request yesterday, I made some individual crème brûlées for dessert. It has been several years since I last made these burnt sugar topped custards, but luckily my experience making crème caramels through the bakery internship earlier this year made it go pretty smoothly. At least up until I got to the torching part.

This recipe called for pure vanilla flavor, which I was instructed to get by grinding up half a vanilla bean with some sugar in a coffee grinder. I had only ever used the vanilla bean seeds before, so this was definitely a new experience for me. I did not realize that the outer hull of the bean pod was also edible.

So I began by chopping up the vanilla bean into small pieces, then placing those with about 1/4 cup of sugar in my parents' old coffee bean grinder. After a few minutes of grinding, it came out as a nice powdery substance.

Next I heated 1 cup heavy with 1 cup half and half in a medium saucepan, just enough to get some steam, and added the vanilla sugar mixture. I stirred it around until it seemed pretty evenly distributed.

Next was slowly pouring the warm cream mixture into a bowl with 1 egg and 4 egg yolks (which were previously whisked together). The trick with this is to pour it bit by bit down the side of the bowl at first, then whisking it in quickly, since you don't want to cook the eggs.











And then I distributed the custard among 5 ramekins (I only photographed these three for the purposes of this blog since the others are different sizes), and put them into the oven with a water bath (fill up the tray about 1/3 the way up the sides of the ramekins). This is extremely important as it keeps the custards from burning on the bottom.

These cooked at 325 F for about 40 minutes and were then removed from the water bath to cool for a few minutes before chilling. They stayed in the refrigerator the rest of the day until it was time to prepare the burnt topping for serving after dinner.

So...this is the part that got tricky. We had not opened this kitchen torch for several years and while I did a quick test to make sure it worked, I was not prepared for the fact that it would not last. Before I could find that out, however, I sprinkled the white/brown sugar mixture I had put together (dry out 1/4 cup of each in a slightly heated oven and then grind in a food processor until find) over the tops of the custards.

After several attempts to keep the torch on, I managed to get one pretty well caramelized topping, which I then served to my dad with a few raspberries.


                                                                    Voilà ! Vanilla Crème Brûlée.