35.1 Custards and puddings

What a custard is

The word pudding covers many dishes, some of them savory, such as blood sausage. The puddings in the pastry kitchen are custards: milk or cream, sugar and eggs, served as dessert. They come in two families. A stirred custard cooks on top of the stove and is kept moving until it thickens. A baked custard cooks in the oven without stirring until it is firm.

In both, the egg proteins set, or coagulate, and that thickens the liquid. Stirring breaks the set as it forms, so a stirred custard ends up as a sol, a thick liquid that pours. Left alone in the oven, the same mix sets into a gel that you can cut. see chapter 7: Proteins set: coagulation

Safe heat, and too much heat

A food mixture that contains eggs or milk must reach an internal temperature of 74°C (165°F) and stay there for at least 15 seconds. That is the floor for every custard below.

There is a ceiling too, at 185°F: hotter than that and the egg proteins curdle. A stirred custard is done when it coats a metal spoon, at 82–84°C for a mix with two eggs and 77–79°C for a mix with three. Both sit above the safe floor and below the ceiling, so the working window for a custard is narrow.

Stirred custards

Several desserts are cooked on the stove and stirred until thick. Once thick, they can go into a pan, be covered and be chilled.

• Crème anglaise: a stirred custard sauce flavored with vanilla.
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• Pastry cream: thickened with both egg and cornstarch, which makes it thicker and much more stable.
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• Cream pudding: like pastry cream with less starch. It takes flavors well and suits custard pie fillings.
• Blancmange: set with cornstarch alone, no egg. How much starch you use decides whether it is poured or molded.
• Panna cotta: set with gelatin. Heat the milk and cream, sweeten them, then melt soaked (bloomed) gelatin in the hot liquid. Pour into molds and chill until set.
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• Crémeux: French for "creamy". It is usually set with gelatin, chocolate or butter.

A plain stirred custard takes four ingredients.

• 2 cups of milk
• ¼ cup of sugar
• salt
• either 2 or 3 eggs

Mix it like this.

• Heat the milk to 75°C first to save time.
• Pull the chalazae, the white cords on the yolk, out of each egg with a fork.
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• Whisk the eggs only until yolk and white are blended, not until they foam.
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• Mix in the sugar and salt, and stir in the milk.

To cook it as a sauce:

• Use a double boiler. Put just enough water in the bottom pan that the top pan does not touch it, boil it, then turn it down to a simmer.
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• Chill an empty bowl in ice water so it is ready.
• Cook the custard in the top pan, stirring all the time with a rubber spatula and scraping the sides. Go slowly; it takes about 10 to 15 minutes.
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• It is ready when it leaves a coat on a clean metal spoon and is about as thick as a thin white sauce. Dip a spoon in the raw mix first, so you can see the change.
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• Pour it at once into the cold bowl, add vanilla, and keep stirring until it is cool.
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A good stirred custard has these qualities.

• smooth, never curdled
• about as thick as heavy whipping cream
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• mildly eggy
• lightly sweet
• colored by the yolks

A three-egg custard reaches its coating point at a lower temperature than a two-egg one, and it needs more attention while it cooks. Even made from one recipe, two stirred custards can turn out differently and thicken at different temperatures.

Baked custards

A baked custard has the same base as a stirred one: dairy, sugar and eggs, most often whole eggs. Whole eggs give a firmer, steadier custard. Yolks alone make it richer and softer. A baked custard can be a dessert on its own, a pie filling, or the base of another dessert. A good one holds a clean, sharp edge when you cut it.

• Heat the milk or cream and add it to the eggs slowly. Warm liquid shortens the baking time and helps the custard cook evenly.
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• Skim the foam off the top of the mix. Foam left on spoils the look of the baked custard.
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• Bake at a low heat, 325°F, since a cooler oven makes overcooking and curdling less likely. A plain custard is also baked at 375°F, and crème brûlée and flan at 350°F.
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• Set the cups in a water bath so the edges and center cook at the same pace. Each cup can sit on a wire rack in very hot water that comes nearly as high as the custard.
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• Test with a thin knife in the center. If it comes out clean, the custard is done. Or push a clean metal knife half an inch below the surface near the center and look for no custard sticking to it.
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A good baked custard has these qualities.

• pale golden brown
• smooth and evenly set, with no holes
• a uniform gel that holds a clear cut edge
• slightly sweet, with a mild egg taste

Some pies are baked custards too. Pumpkin and sweet potato pies set because of their eggs. They need no water bath, but a low oven still helps them cook evenly. Cheesecake is a dense baked custard, again set by eggs. It does go in a water bath so it cooks evenly and stays smooth. Overbaked, it cracks. When it is done, turn the oven off, open the door a little and let the cake cool inside.

Four classic custards

Crème brûlée.

• Heat half-and-half with sugar to about 80°C.
• Whisk egg yolks with vanilla, then pour the hot liquid in slowly while whisking.
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• Bake in a hot water bath at 350°F for 45 to 55 minutes, until a knife comes out clean.
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• Cool the cups quickly in an ice bath.
• Sprinkle sugar on top and brown it under the broiler.
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Flan.

• Spread caramel sauce in the bottom of each cup, which stands in for caramelizing sugar there.
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• Heat milk and sugar to about 80°C and whisk it slowly into an egg beaten with vanilla.
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• Bake and chill as for crème brûlée.
• Run a knife around the cold custard and turn it out onto a plate.

Chocolate pot de crème. This one is not baked. Heat cream, chocolate chips and sugar in a double boiler, stirring, until the chocolate melts and the mix reaches about 85°C. Whisk it slowly into pasteurized egg yolk and vanilla, then cool in an ice bath.

Eggnog. Whisk pasteurized egg yolk, milk and sugar, and stir it in a double boiler until it reaches 77°C. Cool it over ice, then add the cream and vanilla, cover and chill. Eggnog made from raw eggs has caused outbreaks of food poisoning, and pasteurized eggs are the safer choice wherever a recipe would use raw ones. see chapter 15: Pasteurized eggs in place of raw

Steamed puddings

Some puddings cook in steam, either in a commercial steamer or in a steamer set up on the stove. The best known is Christmas pudding, also called plum pudding: dense, rich and usually served in cold weather. see chapter 9: How to steam

Cooling, storing and holding custards

A custard is safest when it moves through the danger zone, 4°C to 60°C (40°F to 140°F), as fast as possible. Cooked food must drop from 60°C (140°F) to 20°C (68°F) within two hours. It then has four more hours to get from 20°C down to 4°C (40°F).

• Never cool a big pot of custard whole. Divide it into single servings first, then cool them.
• Stir it in a container set in ice water. Stainless steel or aluminum passes heat well; plastic does not.
• Shallow pans, no more than 5 cm (2 in.) deep, cool fastest. Do not stack them, and leave them loosely covered until cold, then cover tightly.

Store finished custards at 4°C (40°F) or colder. Keep dairy products between 2°C and 4°C (36–39°F), wrapped and in an area of their own, because milk fat soaks up strong smells.

A food held refrigerated longer than 24 hours needs a label with the day it was made and a "serve by" date. As a rule, throw out a PHF that has not been used within three days of being made.

A baked custard is cooled, then covered and refrigerated. That cooling must still meet the two-stage times above.