tisdag 1 januari 2013

Vanilla custard

In Italy, you can get the most delicious vanilla custard at any patisserie. I have been trying to reproduce the same effect for ages. And never succeeded. But today I think that I kind of know the answer. When you try to do your own vanilla custard, you always use the real ingredients: egg yolks, sugar, cream, milk.... But I think the pros do not use all those eggs as it would be much too expensive to do some little amount of custard. So my guess is they use some other emulsifier instead. I think the vegegel from Dr. Oetker's is a very interesting kind of product that gives a texture similar to the purchase cream.
In the meantime, until I get to test my theory, here is the recipe with original ingredients.

Ingredients
400g milk
100g cream (38-40% fat)
150g egg yolks
150g sugar
17g corn starch
17g rice starch (I could never find this so I used rice flour instead)
1/2 vanilla flower

Instructions
Whip sugar and egg yolks. Add starches and vanilla flower powder.
Cook milk and cream. When the liquid is boiling through in the mixture above and then whip it up neatly for about 1 minute. If you wait too long to whip, the eggs might scramble up themselves giving an omelette taste to the custard (believe my word... :O( ) resulting in a less smooth custard and a less enjoyable taste.
You will notice that the whipped mixture will actually float in the liquid keeping the whole from sticking to the bottom of the pot.
Note: do not use flour as an emulsifier as the flour can make the custard liquify. Also the rice and the corn starch give different texture so it is good to mix them it seems (I have never tasted how the custard would taste with only one of those actually, but well, I simply follow the recipe.). And by the way, next time I might give it a try to actually use the vegegel from Dr. Oetker's I think. That texture reminds me of both vanilla custard from Royal my mom used to do for me when I was a child and the custard you could find in the purchased petits choux.


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