Perfect Creme Brulee at Home

Crème brûlée is such an incredible dessert. The vanilla custard is smooth and creamy and that sugar glass top is sweet and it just shatters when you tap it with your spoon. The problem is without the right method that custard can turn watery or curdled in the oven. One of our main techniques for a silky custard that never fails is baking in a water bath. Custards like low heat and a moist environment. I think you're going to be amazed at how easy this is to make. You need five simple ingredients. Let's have some fun. A couple things you'll need for this bake. You'll need a kitchen torch. You need one that has a really hot flame for that brûlée portion when we're scorching the sugar. You need about a one inch flame. I'll link this one in the description if you want to get the one I'm using. Also I'm using a low profile shallow ramekin. This gives you the best custard to crust ratio in every spoonful and if you like a thicker custard and maybe less of the sugar on top then you can use a ramekin like this. So let's get started. A couple things you'll need to do ahead of time. Put some water on to boil. We'll be baking our custards in a water bath and then you need to grab a baking dish that will hold your ramekins and you want to make sure that your baking dish is high enough on the sides that it'll hold water and we'll be putting the water in up to about halfway on the baking dishes. So just make sure the dish that you're putting your ramekins in is high enough to hold boiling water. Okay turn your oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit or 150 Celsius. Grab a medium-sized saucepan and then our five simple ingredients are this. You'll need two and a quarter cups of heavy cream. That's 540 milliliters. You'll need a third cup of granulated sugar, 65 grams. This is an eighth of a teaspoon of fine sea salt. That's about 0.25 grams. You'll need five egg yolks in a medium-sized heatproof bowl. You'll need a whisk and I have this beautiful little vanilla bean. Add your cream into the saucepan and then add just a portion of the sugar. This does not have to be exact. Some of this sugar will go into our egg yolks. We'll whisk that in. Adding a little bit of sugar into the cream keeps it from burning on the bottom of the pan or turning brown and getting a film down there. So just adding a little bit in and I'm just going to give it a little bit of a stir. While we prep our vanilla bean, I'm going to turn the cream on to just a low heat. If you're using vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste, wait until after this is heated to put it in because they have an alcohol base and that will kind of cook off as you're heating the milk or the cream. So add that in after we're done. If you're using a bean, put it in now and just spread it open. You see all those little beautiful seeds in there. Then take the backside of your knife and just scrape the seeds out. You can see all the little seeds. Just put that right into your cream. Then we're putting the the bean in. Grab your egg yolks and pour the rest of the sugar in. Add your salt and give this a whisk until it's dissolved. Now leave your whisk in the bowl because you'll be needing this in a moment. When this comes to temperature, we'll be pouring this hot mixture into the eggs to temper them or raise the temperature slowly on these. So just keep this nearby. Watch your cream when you see little bubbles around the outside edge. You don't have to stir it or anything. Just keep a close eye on it. Don't let it boil. When you see those little bubbles and it's starting to simmer, that's when we'll pour it into here. This cream is nice and steamy hot. I'm going to remove the bean and then gently whisk the eggs while you're pouring a stream of the cream in. You don't want to add too much in at a time because we don't want to cook the eggs. They'll scramble and we don't want that. So a little bit at a time, we are gently increasing the temperature of the eggs so that they don't cook. And you can just add the rest in. See all those little vanilla bean seeds in there? This smells absolutely incredible. It's going to taste so good. Now pour this through a fine mesh sieve into a large measuring cup. I have a few air bubbles in here and I do not want those to transfer into the custard dishes. We want no air bubbles on the top of our custard. So I'm hitting it just lightly with my torch. Just takes them away. There. Nice and smooth. Pour your custard into your dishes. Just try to divide it as evenly as you can. These are four ounce dishes by the way. So there are a few bubbles in each one of these and again we want our custard to be finished just perfectly smooth on top. So I will be hitting these bubbles again with my torch just to make them all go away so we have a nice smooth top. Okay. Pour your boiling water in. Again you just want to get it to the level where it's halfway up the side of your dishes. Now it's time to get them in the oven. We'll be putting these in the oven for 30 to 40 minutes. You'll be looking for the outside edges to be set much like a cheesecake and then the center should have a little bit of a jiggle. The last time I baked them they took 35 minutes so that's what I'm aiming for. Make sure you set a timer. I'll show you how to do the jiggle test. Come on in here. All right. If you jiggle the pan slightly you should see the outside is set and you can see a slight jiggle in the center of the custards. They are done. So carefully remove them from the oven. Now we need to remove them from the water bath and this is the way that I've found it just the easiest way to do it. Slide a spatula underneath and then just transfer it over to a cooling rack. So you can see they're very jiggly on the inside. They will continue to set as they cool. The custard needs to come to room temperature. It probably takes about an hour to two hours. Then you need to place them in the refrigerator uncovered for at least an hour. Then cover them and they need to chill for anywhere from 4 to 24 hours. Right before we serve them we'll brulee the sugar on the top. So I'll see you back here in a bit. Our custards are chilled. It's time to brulee some sugar. You may see some condensation on the top of them. I have some napkins here. You'll just want to press a napkin onto the top of each one and just press around it and it will draw up any moisture that's on there. We don't want the sugar going into that moisture. It will just melt like having a dry surface is essential. I have extra fine sugar here. I'm getting one level teaspoon. That's about four grams. I'm using extra fine sugar because it has smaller uniform granules and they they melt easier with the flame. So put this right in the center and then just pick up your ramekin and just tap it and kind of move it around like this until you have it all out to the edges and evenly distributed. Then just turn your torch on. Set your torch to a medium flame and then just keep it back about this far and just go in circles. You'll see it start to bubble. Stop and let the ramekin rest for 60 seconds and that lets this base layer firm up and then we'll do it again. Let this sit for about three minutes. This needs time to just harden and get brittle and it smells lovely. Then we'll crack into this and have a bite. It's been three minutes. Listen it has a perfect sugar glass top. Now for a bite. This custard is perfect. It is smooth and creamy and the sugar top it almost tastes like marshmallows or something like a burnt toasted marshmallow. It is so so good. Well that's how easy it is to create a restaurant quality creme brulee and I do feel like this went by very quickly. So I think you should right here and we'll bake something else together. I'll see you there.