Crepas con Cajeta

[Music] hi everyone and thank you so much for joining me here in the kitchen today we're tackling probably mexico's most famous sweet treat i mean some people might say flan is the most famous but i'm going to say cajeta is the most famous it's a caramel but made in a different way than say a european style caramel where you caramelize sugar and add some cream to that now this is a caramel that is made from the reduction the slow simmering away and reducing of dairy now that dairy typically is goat's milk in mexico which makes it super interesting in its flavor but maybe you know the version that comes from further south down in latin america that's called dulce de leche which is typically made from cow's milk so mexican cajete you can think of as a goat's milk thing and that's what we're going to make today but if goat's milk is not your thing you can use the exact same recipe and the same set of instructions to make an all cow's milk version or maybe you can't even put your hands on goat's milk i don't know it's available in all the grocery stores here in chicagoland i'm going to show you the very classic way to do it on the stovetop but i'm also going to show you the absolutely simplest way that you can do it kind of turns out a different different type of cajeta or dulce de leche using a can of sweetened condensed milk so first things first i'm going to put the pan over a pretty high fire just to get it going here and i've got my two quarts of goat's milk now you have to do this in a large pan so something that you would use to boil pasta in is probably a good choice there a soup pot might be right it should be something that can hold at least six quarts of liquid so we'll put that in there and then i like to flavor mine with some mexican cinnamon you can leave it in or you can put it i mean you can leave it in or you can keep it out there are some people that will flavor it at the end with a little bit of vanilla because we're all so much about the salted caramel these days i have started putting some salt in my cajete and you might like that as well but you don't have to feel like that this is going to be something that is necessary to do but i put a kind of heaping half teaspoon of salt in here and then goes the sugar i'm using organic sugar which is always a more tan color and way more full of flavor maybe you have that and you would like that to go in your cajeta i just think it makes a really lovely flavor in here and then we'll whisk this now this has to come to the steaming point which would be about 150 or 60 degrees not yet to the full simmer i'm just going to leave that sitting there because there's one more element we have to add to this before we turn the temperature down and just let it simmer away for about an hour and that is we're going to neutralize some of the acid in here by adding a little bit of baking soda that we will dissolve in some in some water i'll show you that when we get to that stage but let's set up the pressure cooker or instant pots and so many people have instant pots today i thought it would be fun to do this one it turns out a slightly different textured carreta but i have here sweetened condensed milk and i'm going to open the can but leave it in the can tip that little top off there and get rid of that messy thing right over there now i've got a piece of foil here to tamp down around the can now inside the instant pot here i have about two inches of water that i've already put and the little steamer trivet that goes in here that keeps everything up off of the bottom is i've also put in there so we'll put this down in here it should come at least a third of the way up the can put the top in place here i can't quite see where i'm going over there on that side of it and then seal it up make sure that you've got the vent turned to close there and then i'm going to put pressure cooker i've set it here for 40 minutes and it will just do its own thing you don't have to watch it or anything when this finishes the 40 minutes it's turning itself on there when it finishes the 40 minutes i'm just going to do a quick release of the pressure that's in there and show you what it looks like at that point let's come back over to the stovetop version here and let's see what our temperature is like okay so it's at about 120 degrees now so a little what we would say it feels warm warmer than body temperature and once we get to about 140 or so we can put the soda in here baking soda in there i'm just going to put a little bit of water in it first dissolve it with my finger and then when this steams i'll put it in i want to show you what it looks like then because it might surprise you okay it's to that sort of steaming point now i'm gonna take it off of the fire here um because when you put this soda in there it has a tendency to foam up because of the acidity natural acidity that there is in the goat's milk and sometimes it can come up really high this one's not doing very much it's getting a lot foamier but it's not it's not rising up to the top of the pot or anything okay now we'll put it back onto the fire and our goal here is to let it simmer at a sort of what i would call brisk simmer or a very gentle boil not at a hard boil because that will scorch on the bottom if you do that and when it comes to that i will show you what that gentle boiler or brisk simmer looks like that's the way we're going to leave it for basically an hour we i always like to really check back on it after 45 minutes but if you have it at a gentle simmer or gentle boil for 45 minutes it should take care of itself this is about the kind of [Music] gentle boil that i'm looking for and as this got hotter and hotter it got foamier and foamier so don't be surprised if that happens to yours but this nice gentle boil i think is the perfect way to describe what we're looking for here the slower you go with this the better your kahetta will turn out it'll turn out a darker more golden color and i'll show you what that looks like when we come back okay it's finished i turned it off it's done it's 40 minutes i'm going to quick release the steam so don't let that scare you there but we have to release it to get into what this once we stop hearing the steam coming out i'll open it up and show you what we have we'll uncover the steamy thing here and i'm going to use you could use an oven mitt for this but i'm going to use a pair of tongs to get it out and uncover it okay so it's still very hot so i'm going to just use my towel to hold on to it here and then scoop it into a bowl you'll be surprised at what it looks like now you know what regular sweetened condensed milk looks like well this is almost like a kind of cajeta pudding at this point but you can see it's caramelized and really lovely of course this won't have that goat milk there was one time in our history that you could get a goat's milk sweetened condensed milk but i haven't found it for a long time so just beat it with a whisk and you'll notice here that we're getting that dulce de leche at the consistency out out of it it's beautiful stuff then scrape that into a jar i would recommend that you would keep that in your in your refrigerator and enjoy it on crepes like i'm going to show you here in a minute or you could enjoy it just as an ice cream topping it's absolutely delicious i'm going to have a quick taste of this one before we go on it's super creamy super caramelly just what i think of more as dulce de leche than the more complex flavor of mexican cajeta made with goat's milk but certainly within easy reach of anyone that has a pressure cooker or an instant pot [Music] after about 45 minutes all of the bubbles start to get a little bit bigger and it'll still be a kind of pale amber color at that time and then over that last 15 20 minutes or so i keep turning the fire down and i keep looking at it you can stir it if you would like to at that time just stir it to make sure that it's not sticking at all on the bottom but this is the time when you're gonna test it okay and you're going to see if at when it's cold if it has the consistency of that dulce de leche that we're looking for here so what i did was to put a small plate into the freezer and get it really cold and then i can just dribble a little bit of this on the cold plate it will really quickly cool off and so once it gets to that cold place let's just test it here together this is probably cool now yeah okay so it's cooled off and you can see that it has that sort of sticky honey like consistency to it now that it's cooled off and that's exactly what i'm looking for so it's finished now if yours doesn't come out this dark it's maybe because you didn't leave it on at that last thickening browning period long enough so just turn your fire down i kept turning the fire down on this and more and more and more and it turns this gorgeous color but not necessarily exactly in that 15 minutes it may be 15 more minutes to get to the right color just use a really low fire as you're doing this then scrape that into a bowl through a strainer boy this stuff looks good so good and it smells so good it smells really different than that dulce de leche that we made in the instant pot i strain it through because you never know there may be little clumps in here that have to do with just what formed on the edge of the pot so i like to strain it and then you also get out the pieces of cinnamon that were if you put cinnamon in it now this is the point at which you could put a little dark rum in it if you wanted although i will recommend that you boil it a little bit more if you're going to dilute it dilute the consistency of it with a little bit of dark rum that's absolutely delicious here a little brandy you could even put bourbon in here you might want to stir in a little bit of vanilla if you like that that flavor and there you've got one of the most glorious things from the mexican kitchen which is a perfect pot of kahetta now it really may surprise you that one of the most common uses for cajeta is with crepes i mean crepes are part of what we think of coming from france right but they're super common in mexico and there's a reason for that back in the middle of the 1800s for a time being mexico fell to the habsburg empire and so there was a king of mexico maximilian and he said he was going to europeanize mexico by bringing all of these beer brewers and bread bakers and pastry makers and with the pastry makers came the tradition of crepes and so they are super popular everywhere in mexico and you say crepes crepes with cajeta and everybody's mouth water so i'm going to show you how to make them very straightforward way to do it i'm going to show you what for me is the recipe for crepes that i have used for over 40 years it starts by combining some milk and of course we'll have all the details in this recipe of the recipe below here and some water so it's a lean kind of batter i have a cup of flour this would be all-purpose flour in this and a couple of eggs and then a little bit of melted butter goes in here and a half a teaspoon of salt i that one going in there blend this mixture until it's completely smooth i may have to scrape down the sides once or twice and then let it sit for an hour for all the flour to absorb all of the liquid now i'm deep into crepe making here this is my foolproof way of doing it it's the way i've done it for a long long time and i want to share it with you because it makes crepes super easy and approachable so i'm working in about a seven inch non-stick pan here this is my original and very treasured crepe pan i inherited this from my mother who got this one for a wedding present in 1950 but it's a really really well seasoned cast iron pan it works great i'm going to show you because most of you will have access to a non-stick pan a small non-stick pan like this how to do it usually at the very beginning of crepe making i will just brush on a little bit of oil but i'll tell you with a non-stick pan it's almost not necessary i transferred our batter into something that i can easily hold in my hand and my way of doing it is to heat the pan first and get it quite hot okay and this is what you have to sort of learn we'll talk that through as you see this going here get it quite hot and then i'm going to pour the batter in and then pour it out i'm gonna pour in that much let it sit for three seconds and then pour it out now if you've gotten the temperature of the pan right you will see all of these little lacy holes around the outside of it that's what you're looking for if you don't get those it means your batter is too thick or your pan is too not hot enough or you left it in there too long before you poured it out this is a little bit of a kind of learn as you go thing adjusting the temperature to be just right for this maybe adding a tablespoon of water to your your batter if it's a little bit on the thick side not much you could do if it's on the thin side but i don't think if you follow my recipe that that's going to happen where i poured off the batter on the side here i just remove that that makes really nice snacks as you're going through the making of the crepes and then after about 45 seconds or so run a little spatula around the outside i do this with my fingers but you might want to do that picking it up with a pair of tongs or a spatula to flip it over you can see it's beautifully browned underneath the second side is only about 30 seconds or so of cooking now these are what i call dessert crepes they're the lacy kind of dessert crepes and they make a very elegant dessert they're not like what the street vendors often do on those really large griddles the round griddles where they're going to make something that's quite a bit thicker and substantial so that you can eat it as you're walking this is a dessert style crepe okay our 30 seconds are up so i'll pick it up i'm going to show you just one more how that works i'm not going to oil it this time tip it around my three seconds pour it off and it was probably a little bit more than three seconds because i didn't get as much laciness around the outside so that would tell me to pour it off a little faster the next time i got a little bit of laciness but not too much that just ensures that laciness ensures that i'm going to have a very delicate crepe here free it up around the outside that one flipped over and after about 45 seconds flip it over and cook it on the other side i've got a few more crepes to make here and then i'll show you how to turn it into my favorite version of crepes so we've got the glorious carreta two different versions of it but we also have the cajeta that you could buy in the grocery store and from mexico you'd probably have to find this in a mexican grocery store you can get this coronado brand that is made with all goats milk and it's really quite good the difference between this one and this one is that this has a lot of corn syrup in it so it has a consistency a little bit more like the one that we made in the instant pot okay but we're gonna make it with the homemade cajeta because i have it and i love it i've got some melted butter here and i'm going to brush the top this is the the second side of the of the crepe the one that's not as pretty that one is the one that's going to go up here and then just take a spoonful of the cajeta and smear it across fold it i like these to be buttery so i butter a little bit there fold it into quarters now a little bit of butter on the top of that i'm going to brush the bottom of this baking dish with a little butter as well and then lay them in here shingled two different rows of six each and i will meet you back here when that's all done [Music] now our buttery crepes with the little smear of gaeta on the inside are going to go into a hot oven i've got this at 450 degrees so a hot oven i want them to crisp up a little bit because that's what the butter will help them do at this point and then we'll top them of course with more cajeta [Music] okay these look really really beautiful so some of the cajeta sort of oozes out of them and you'll see it boiling around on the sides there but what i'm looking for is that the edges will be crisp that will probably take depending on exactly the temperature of your oven someplace around seven or eight minutes something like that so set a timer for it and then i want re-warmed some of our homemade cajeta that i am going to drizzle over these guys this just gets me very excited i'm really a dessert person but when you put cajeta on practically anything i love it on fried plantains with a little bit of crema and then we've got some toasted pecans you could use any kind of nut for this but toasted pecans is sort of traditional on crepes and there you have it a really amazing treat with your own homemade cajeta homemade either a long time on the stovetop or in an instant pot you can go either way it's going to be glorious and delicious so try your own

Channel: Rick Bayless

Views: 19,199

Rating: 4.9608269 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: pxlQVkX4LsY

Length: 22min 33sec (1353 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021