Last weekend’s project was Crème Brulee. We received one of those sets with the ramekins and the little torch a while back and just hadn’t gotten around to using it yet. Making the cream was very easy. Cream, an egg yolk, sugar, and vanilla. That’s it. On the stove, I heated the cream and sugar together, and while that was going I separated an egg and mixed it with vanilla. Because of my tendency to drop things (see Thai Veggie Pizza), I had Brett gradually add the hot cream to the egg while I stirred. It was teamwork at its best, and we ended up with absolutely no clumps. We did however strain it anyway, because the recipe said so, and I’m such a rule follower. I also supervised while Brett poured the cream mixture into the ramekins, and I let Brett pour the boiling water for the water bath (again with the pouring/dropping problems.) Brett is an extremely good pourer. We covered it with foil and Brett did all the transferring in and out of the oven. We came across the problem of removing the ramekins from the water bath when it was finished baking and we ended up using a turkey baster to remove the water. We let them chill for a couple of hours and then got to work on the brulee portion.
Now you may think that because I’m such a wuss with the pouring of hot things, that I would also be a wuss about using the torch, but I’m not. It was actually quite fun!
We had heard that brown sugar goes a lot faster than white, so we tried both. I guess you could say that brown sugar does go faster, because it immediately catches on fire! It smelled like burned marshmallows (which is a good thing) but frankly looked pretty black and unappetizing. It also didn’t make the super crunchy crust that everyone loves to break through. The white sugar did take a very long time (we probably almost used up all the butane- which Brett used as a Scrabble word in an incredibly embarrassing defeat for me- let’s never speak of it again.) But it was worth the wait. It got golden and perfectly crusty and was delicious! I may never need to order it in a restaurant again, that’s how good it was!