Crème brûlée
Extracting vanilla out of the vanilla pod using a knife.
I had some guests for dinner last week. I wanted to make some special things and one of them is of course the dessert. I remembered that I ate a portion of Crème brûlée in some restaurant few months ago and decided to see if I could get good results as well.
The technical crowning of this dessert is a hand blow torch I got myself some time ago – just for this purpose. When preparing a portion of Crème brûlée you will need to caramelize its surface after it got solid. For this you will need a blow torch, which is the fun method or you could simply use your oven on “grill” settings for 3-4 minutes.
Ingredients (for 6 persons):
- 500 ml (17 oz.) Cream (38% fat…)
- ½ a vanilla pod
- ½ tea spoon lemon peel zest
- 100 gr sugar (I find it too sweet so I use 80 gr)
- 5 egg yolks
- Sugar for the caramelized coating
Directions
Cream, lemon zest and vanilla heated in a pot.
Use a sharp knife to cut the vanilla pod lengthwise and open it up. Scrap the inside of the vanilla pod out of its content. Put in a pot the cream, vanilla pod content and the pod itself (to get all the aroma out), lemon zest and half the sugar. Slowly heat up the pot until the sugar dissolves, bring to the boiling point and take the pot off the fire. Use a spoon to fish out the pieces of the vanilla pod and throw it away – we will not need it anymore. Let the pot cool down for about 10 minutes.
Beat in a bowl the 5 egg yolks to a cream while slowly adding the rest of the sugar.Then slowly pour the content of the pot to the egg yolk cream while constantly mixing the content in the bowl. This is to prevent the egg yolks from becoming a sweet scrambled egg under the heat of the heated whipped cream 
.
Fill the cream-egg mixture in ceramic fireproof forms. You could use Souffleé cups or other, flatter forms just as I did. Set the forms inside a baking form and fill up the baking form with water so the Crème brûlée forms are standing up to the half of their height in water. This is to prevent the delicate Crème brûlée from getting burned. Keep the forms for 45-60 minutes in the oven (140°C/284°F) until the Crème brûlée becomes firm. Take the forms out of the oven and let them cool down before putting them in the fridge for one hour.
Caramelized Crème brûlée
Take the Crème brûlée forms out of the fridge put 1-1½ table spoon of sugar on each Crème brûlée and shake it from side to side. That will cause the sugar to spread evenly on the upper surface of the Crème brûlée. Then use the hand blow torch to caramelize the sugar coating. Take care not to burn the sugar too much. The caramel layer gives the Crème brûlée its final touch.
Enjoy!
