Crème Brûlée in Two Ways (1)

What makes restaurant food different from home food?
Many home cooks make tasty food just as restaurant cooks do, but making decorative food or food that require a lot of ingredients and steps is more challenging. Making food with complicated steps and many ingredients is not easy to do in a home kitchen, but how about decoration? You can easily re-arrange some of the elements in your food and make them look great!

I want to show you how you can re-arrange or twist the cooking steps to make restaurant-food-alike at home.

Here is the first one. "Crème Brûlée in Two Ways".

Crème brûlée is a dessert that is easy to make, as long as you have a torch at home. Yeah... so you don't have a torch. Don't worry! Although you will need a torch for my first crème brûlée which is the traditional one, you don't need a torch for the second crème brûlée which is the "fancy" re-arranged one, to be posted later.


First,
Crème Brûlée
Traditional style

(Yield: 4 servings / Cooking time: three hours*)
*Cooking time includes custard cooling time two hours

Ingredients:
+ 300 ml heavy cream
+ 45g sugar (plus extra for burned crust on top)
+ 3 egg yolks
+ a half vanilla bean
+ berries for decoration


(I used light brown sugar for the cream and regular white granulated sugar for the crispy top)

Procedures:
1. Preheat oven at 300°F (150°C).

2. Cut the vanilla bean in half length wise, and scrap the vanilla bean with back of your pairing knife.


3. Mix well heavy cream, sugar, and vanilla beans (with the peels together) in a sauce pan, and heat over medium heat. As soon as the cream mixture start bubbling turn off the heat and let it cool for 15 min. Take out the vanilla bean peels.


4. In a bowl, whisk egg yolks and temper the egg yolks with warm cream mixture from #3. Whisk gently... try not to make too much bubbles.


5. Boil a kettle of water.

6. Arrange four crème brûlée ramekins in a hotel pan or any large shallow pan and pour #4 into ramekins. Make a loose cover with cooking foil.


7. Place the pan in the oven (as shown in picture). Make sure the rack is a bit out so that you can easily pour hot water into the pan. Pour #5 boiling water into a pan half way up to the ramekins. Take care not to splash water into ramekins. We want to cook the custard over double boiler so that it can be gently cooked and not be overcooked. If custard is overcooked, it will curdle and results in grainy texture and eggy taste.


8. Cover the pan with cooking foil and slide into oven slowly. Bake until the custard is set but still trembling in the center when you shake the ramekins gently, approximately 40-45 minutes.


9. Remove the ramekins from the pan and refrigerate for at least two hours until custard firms. You can keep the custards in refrigerator up to three days with plastic covers.


10. Take out the custard from refrigerator at least 15 minutes before serving to make sure it is not too cold. Sprinkle sugar on top of each ramekin evenly, and brown the sugar with a torch until the crispy top is formed.


11. Decorate with some berries and serve.



Enjoy~

To be continued...