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crème brulé


Kim
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Hi Everyone,

I'm doing a page on my website about crème brulé.  It's one of my favorite French desserts but I'm having problems duplicating the results of a good resto crème brulé at home.  I've got the crème part down - it's the brulé that is getting to me.  I have now bought a small blow tourch and am giving that a try in the next couple of days.  In the meantime I was wondering if any of you had had success using the oven broiler to get a hard shell finish to your cream brulé.  I'm starting to think it just depends on what kind of oven one has, or perhaps this method never works?  Anybody have success making crème brulé at home?

Thanks for your time.

Kim

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[quote user="Kim"]

I'm doing a page on my website about crème brulé.  It's one of my favorite French desserts

[/quote]

You mean the one allegedly invented at Trinity, Cambridge in the 17thC? Or Spain in the 18th or France in the late 19th ?

BTW what is a broiler please ?

John

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As I'm sure you do know, John, a broiler in this instance is an oven grill.

Kim, if you want a slightly thicker (harder) layer of caramel that needs to be cracked to break in, you should caramelise some sugar in a robust saucepan and pour the resulting  caramel quickly (and carefully [;-)]) over throughly set, chilled custards.

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Hi Kim

I regularly make crème brulée in the restaurant.  The comments are that it is the best they have had... both French and non-native.

If you want the exact recipe let me know and I will write it down.

I use creme fraiche 30% and milk entier... double cream is a big no no for me personally.

For the brulée bit you need... a heavy duty blow torch.. 30€ in any bricolage and a gas canister 1€ in leclerc.

Dont use one of those little blow torches as you will be there for ages and they cost about the same.

You can always use the blow torch for browning other foods if they did not brown enough in the oven.

Forget an over or grill.. it wont happen and you will end up warming the creme up too much.

osie

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Bonsoir,

Thanks for the spelling correction Dick and Claire.  Do I still have to put that little hat on the u Claire?  For some reason I thought the French we're doing away with those.

Hey John, I bet I have a lot of funny words for you.  I had an English friend in Corsica for a while and we always enjoyed discovering we had different words for things.  And I though crème brulée was straight up French food!  Guess I got to get out more.  How do you find out such things?

Osie - Thanks for the recipe offer.  the one I've come to like has both milk and cream in equal portions and not too much sugar.  Lots of egg yolks.  I'm hesitant to use crème fraiche in any recipe, although I'd love to, because I'm aiming my site at North American cooks and as far as I know crème fraiche is difficult to find in the grocery store there.  I wonder if the same is true in the UK?  The only thing I'm a bit shaky on is the cooking time.  I've seen it baked on low heat for a long time and on high heat for a short time.  Low heat seems to be working best, but I don't know ifeveryone will have the patience (or time) for that.  'Fraid I've already bought the cheap model blow torch!

And Catalpa - That's a great idea.  I'm mixing up another batch tomorrow and I'm trying your idea on a couple and my new blow torch on some others.

Thanks everyone;  Have a good sleep!

Kim

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[quote user="Kim"] Do I still have to put that little hat on the u Claire?  For some reason I thought the French we're doing away with those.[/quote]

Not that I am aware of [:)] The accents are still very much in use , although not seen as essential when using capital letters. For û, hold the "alt" key and type "0251" on your numeric keypad.

Following on from Catalpa's suggestion, I too have read about using cold caramel pieces rather than sugar. Apparently it sets hard when heated.

Re cooking, using a bain-marie stops air bubbles from forming inside the cream.

The cream must be really cold before the sugar/caramel is heated.

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I could have sworn that I'd seen something about the circonflex becoming optional or even eventually being done away with. I found this reference in Wikipedia.

« Nouvelle » orthographe [modifier]

Conscients des grandes difficultés que représente l'emploi de l'accent circonflexe et du nombre d'incohérences dans son emploi, les experts représentant les instances francophones compétentes chargés de mettre au point des simplifications de l'orthographe officielle du français ont proposé en 1990 des rectifications orthographiques, publiées au Journal officiel de la République française qui prévoient la suppression du circonflexe sur i et u dans les seuls cas où cela n'entrainait pas d'ambigüité (il croît ─ verbe croître ─ garde son circonflexe pour se différencier d'il croit ─ verbe croire). Ces recommandations, vivement critiquées à leur annonce, ne sont pratiquement pas appliquées en France (ce dont l'Académie française a pris acte tout en le regrettant) alors qu'elles ont été entérinées en Belgique et au Canada par les Conseils de la langue française ainsi que par le Conseil international de la langue française (pour la francophonie) et qu'elles sont suivies dans les pays concernés avec plus ou moins de rigueur[5].

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I think it would be a real shame to lose the circumflex.  I find it quite helpful in translations. If a word has a circumflex, then it probably had an s in old French and then it makes it more comparable to English words in many cases.  It may not always be necessary and I may not use accents all the time because they are a pain on English computers, but I don't like to see things like that going.  For example I use apostrophes in texts on mobile phones.  On some old English typewriters there used to be "dead" keys which were keys which had the French accents and it would type and then you could type the e or whatever under it.  Because it was a "dead key" it didn't move on after being typed.  I wish there was a simple solution like that to using French accents on a computer!  It's true that language has always evolved, but surely education has reached a stage where everyone can learn the same thing and keep it the way it is now.  There is surely no advantage to simplifying things further, it will only make language become more and more boring.  We need to retain it.

 

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Jill - Apple keyboards work in exactly that way. For an acute I simply type alt+e, then the letter, so I get é, and other combinations for à and ê. So I can quickly do é, á, etc. Works very well, and you only have to learn the three combinations for the three accents.

I agree that the circumflex is important, as in château, where the s has been lost.

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My French teacher used to tell me to imagine an S after the circumflexed character if I encountered an unknown word, and in most cases it works...

hôte, host

forêt, forest

hôpital, hospital

côte, coast

rôtir, roast

gôut, degustation etc

Doesn't work with brûlée though [:(]

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It comes from Old French, [brusler].

Brusler seems to come from the Latin [ustulare], to singe, then OF [brusler] to burn. It may have melded with the Old English [broilen], literally to broil. Gives us, in English broil and also brawl, ME [brennen] thence modern English burn. The addition of the br- may be due to exposure to Germanic languages.

My own feeling, as similar words appear in a number of languages, is that it may echo an Indo-European root word, but that is just a hunch.

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I've just discovered something interesting about the Apple keyboard/OS - it won't let you put accents in silly places. If I try to put a circumflex over a y, for example, I get ^y. Or ^t. But it allows ê and â and ô and û. So vowels only. Same applies for acute and grave. I think that's cool.

Now they need to find a way of preventing greengrocer's apostrophe's...

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[quote user="Kim"]

Hey John, I bet I have a lot of funny words for you.  I had an English friend in Corsica for a while and we always enjoyed discovering we had different words for things.  And I though crème brulée was straight up French food!  Guess I got to get out more.  How do you find out such things?

[/quote]

The alleged origin of burnt cream was mentioned by Prue Leith on BBC tv a few nights ago. Backed up by Google/Wikipedia.

I did not know the meaning of broiler - though I now understand that it is an Americanism - as our oven does not have one, I RTFL.

John

 

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[quote user="Dick Smith"]I've just discovered something interesting about the Apple keyboard/OS - it won't let you put accents in silly places. If I try to put a circumflex over a y, for example, I get ^y. Or ^t. But it allows ê and â and ô and û. So vowels only. Same applies for acute and grave. I think that's cool.

Now they need to find a way of preventing greengrocer's apostrophe's...
[/quote]

No, Dick, that would be a tremendous loss.  What, no more potatoe's and tomatoe's, not to mention cabbage's and radishe's? 

What'll I do for a smirk next time I pass a greengrocer's?

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Hey John,

I don't mean to be a pest or anything, but when I check out Wikipedia I find an article that says that although the origin of crème brûlée is unknown, the earliest reference to it is in a French cookbook from 1691.  Did you find a different source? 

My website isn't supposed to be a culinary authority, but I don't want to say crème brùlée is a French invention if it isn't.  Perhaps I will just mention that several countries have their own version of this delicious dessert.  By the way, I had no idea that England had it's own burnt cream.

Kim

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[quote user="Kim"]...I don't want to say crème brùlée is a French invetion if it isn't.  Perhaps I will just mention that several countries have their own version of this delicious dessert.  By the way, I had no idea that England had it's own burnt cream. Kim[/quote]

There's also crema catalana, which is the Spanish version of burnt cream / crème brûlée.

I have heard it said that it originated from Cambridge: see here.

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Hey everyone,

Just wanted to say thanks for your input on my little project.  Claire that link was perfect, it summed up the situation about the origin of the dish.  And Dick, I can see you are very reasoned man, just like your photo shows you.  You are quite right that one can always argue about these things, but let just eat dessert, eh?

I found the inexpensive blow torch did the job just great.  I can now enjoy crème brûlée with all of its accents whenever I wish.

Kind Regards to All,

Kim

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[quote user="Dick Smith"]I think you could very safely say that it is a French specialty, or even a signature dish of French cuisine.

Someone can always find an objection to 'invention'.
[/quote]

I seem to remember reading or seeing that Creme Brulee isn't French, but I think the reason given was that it isn't in the Larousse Gastronomique.  I haven't got it so I can't confirm that.  It's the dessert I always fall back on in restaurants in France, as I don't find French desserts very interesting - too many fruit tarts.  But I suppose if someone has found a 17th century reference to it in France, it must be French.

 

 

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