Decoding French Baking: The Secrets to Making Perfect Baked, Stirred, and Pastry Cream Custards

welcome back everybody now Christmas is slowly creeping in and of course many of you is going to want to make a lot of French desserts and if there is one key skill you need to learn it is the Mastery of making custom a custard for many people is just a synonym of that kind of yellowish sweet sauce but in fact in France it is a super important element that you absolutely need to know in this video I'm gonna give you all the details about what the custard is how it's made and how to use it with free individual demonstration that's going to allow you to make dozens of these Earthworks pass let's go [Music] so what exactly is the core of a custard what are the components what are the ingredients used and let me tell you it's been a heck of a long time I want to make that video because it always amazed me custard this is it the core of it is in front of you or what you need is eggs a little bit of sugar some milk and a flavoring of choice now sometimes you can have milk and cream and remember cream is a byproduct of milk so you can count it as one ingredient but roughly speaking four ingredients represent the most important element of dozens and dozens of French desserts the amount of things you can make with these ingredients is simply absolutely astonishing but before we start I just wanted to put what I'm saying into perspective with a simple picture just to show you the amount of dessert that can be made with this element okay let's look at the screen I always believe that the picture is worth a thousand words but it's true sometimes when your French people think you're always exaggerating you say oh yeah a thousand of dessert with this what you see in front of you is a sample of what can medium of the four ingredients I've just showed you let's start from the top left here that cake you can feel this imagine it's a sponge cake filled with layers of pastry cream the next one with the flam Parisian from partition it's a custard pie the little one next to it is this famous Portuguese start and with the puff pastry and and it are filled with a custard ice cream vanilla ice cream maybe perhaps you didn't know it's a custard that's all it is the next one fruit dots filled with pastry cream down on the next line you've got on the left the creme caramel you know this pudding and with the caramel top this is one we're gonna today we're gonna do today without the caramel I'm going to show you that very easy option and next to it is the famous creme brulee of course same thing it's a custard the party breast is a derivative of pastry cream with some butter added and some hazelnut flavoring floating islands is there that's one of the most amazing thing because simple that's going to use the sweet custard we're going to make today you can also make all kinds of pudding all kinds of pies and special TK that are filled with custard you can make like some king cakes or any cakes that you want and even the cocon boots that you see there the big pyramid are superbs filled with pastry cream with extra whipped cream in there which is called the creme Sultan creme muslin etc etc so just to tell you how amazing custard is okay and that was for the bracket and now for the demonstration the first one we're going to start with the simplest is the liquid form of custard this is what you use to make the creme caramel the creme music like we're going to do here that is the same without the caramels like a little pudding and vanilla pudding that you can have and you can also use this by adding cream in your milk you can make then a creme brulee if you want or you can put that mixture over an apple tart or an apricot tart or a pear tart and cook this in the oven and the whole thing is gonna set it is gonna set because we're using the whole egg and this is the importance in custard that you need to keep in mind okay if you use the whole egg you got the White and the yolks the white is the one thing that's going to make things solid so anything that has to set like think of a quiche for instance now you want your mixture to imprison the bacon you know the you know the onions whatever you put in there your vegetables you need the egg whites so anything that has to set like a pudding it's always the full eggs okay so let me show you how it's done super simple step number one when you make the custard you need to flavor your milk so I've got my 250 milliliters of whole milk that means with full cream and I'm gonna add half a vanilla bean here I'm gonna scrub the seeds and put them in heat on and I'm gonna bring this to a simmer so my milk is warming up slowly the vanilla is going to diffuse and bring some flavor to the milk and that's just enough time for me to prepare this other element this is always the same way to make Casa juice flavor your milk you warm it up and then you're gonna mix your eggs or egg yolks with the sugar so you see here see the amount of egg white that we have all of this is going to be like the semen this one is going to be helping you having the whole mixture set so you've got plenty of eggs put all of your sugar and or what you need to do is to mix the whole lot and wait until the sugar is dissolved and that's it's a whiten the mix slightly so just spend a minute or two or something like this okay we should be done that's the mixture it's a bit like an omelette okay and now the milk is ready I'm gonna grab it so once you've Blended the eggs or the egg yolks with the sugar you need to pour the warm milk over the one thing to be careful of is not to pour too much milk at once otherwise you're gonna curl or cook the eggs so the usual practice is that you usually will sieve you can put a little bit of milk to start with and you start to mix it in and it's going to bring the hole to temperature you're going to avoid the disaster of having too much temperature going into your eggs at once once you've got this usually it's fine if you use small quantities like this it's not a big deal boom we're gonna mix a whole lot and guess what we're done now anytime you make a custard you're using a whisk and you're gonna make things to foam and this is one of the things you have to be careful you see it looks very wide because you need to discard this so you're going to use a spoon with my left hand here to show you but what you want it should discard all of this unwanted foam to reveal the nice yellowish custard under all done so to win time I filtered the custard and I poured it straight into my Ramekin this is called the cremuzu the creme caramel is the exact same thing with a layer of 35 caramel at the bottom of the ramekan it is meant to be undished upside down afterwards this one is not this is the straightforward pudding you can have you serve it cold like this in the Ramekin and that's it what we need now is hot water in here now what I'm saying warm water it is actually a boiling water so I've put a kettle on and I'm gonna feel the water and Let It Go halfway up the dish and then put this in the oven at about 160 degrees Celsius for about 30 minutes so we're done with the first form of custard let's move on to the second one the vanilla custard the sweet nice yellowish sauce the steps are the same the milk is on the stove as we speak with the vanilla 250 ml and it's warming up slowly here I've got 50 grams of sugar as we had before but instead of having the whole egg for the sweet vanilla custard I'm going to be using two egg yolks instead so it's still two eggs and we're gonna blanch the exact same way okay and look at this already a nice pale mix the milk is warm enough and I've transferred into a glass container like this because here because of the egg yolks and the nature of that sauce you really don't want to kind of have that big blast of heat that could curd all your eggs so you have to be quite careful with this one I would advise for the the creme English as it's called the English cream to really go easy you know a little bit at a time and make sure your milk is not boiling hot because the intention here is not to have something super thick remember it's just a sauce so as you can see I've got the same issues before there's some foam you can try to remove as much as you can but at the end of the day what do we have here something that looks exactly the same as before the big difference is now we're going to cook this differently we're going to put this back into the pan and cook that on the stove so how do we make that sweet vanilla custard we'll put this back into the pan and we're gonna cook our cream on a moderate heat of kind of medium Heat and instead of whisking away you have to constantly move or stir like this your mixture to avoid that anything starts to stick to the bottom anything starts to curdle and this is the secret but talking about secrets you know a lot of people say oh you know you have to stay like this keep an eye on it the best thing you can do when you make a vanilla custard is to use a food thermometer this is what I mean by food thermometer 82 to 83 degrees Celsius I'll give you the equivalent finite after is the temperature in which the egg yolk are going to start to or try to attempt to curdle so we don't want it to curl we just want it to kind of inflate a little sort of molecule of eggs are going to kind of get bigger and it gives the impression that you get some kind of thick sauce but if you go too hot you end up with an omelette you know you get like pieces of eggs everywhere in your milk so that's not what you want so the temperature is crucial when you're making a vanilla custard so I'm going to keep on going check my temperature which is at the moment only at 47.48 and I'm gonna stop precisely at about 80 to 83 and show you how it looks like takes a bit of time but we are almost there the giveaway already when you reach that kind of 82 Mark you arrive in the 80 degrees Celsius can you see the the panel It Coats everything in there it's like a creamy kind of thick stuff he's trying to stick to the side of the pan that is now not any more like milk it's not a liquid it really starts to be a cream and it's a sign that is virtually almost ready now it is now absolutely ready nice and thick turn the heat off and I'm going to transfer it immediately into a container I guess actually meant a recipe on threaded in a container but boom you're gonna do this because you want to capture there's always little pieces of egg that's going to start to coagulate a little bit okay and that's normal and when you want this you want to stop the cooking straight away and here we are custard number two this is the vanilla custard the sweet Castor look how it is this is the consistency and thickness of a real custard look at my spoon here it is coating like mad okay if you don't have this you haven't cooked your custard enough very very important 82 degrees or even 83 degrees Celsius is the sweet point you need to leave this to refrigerate in the fridge for at least four hours for the flavors to develop ideally 12 hours do not exceed that time because after that the flavors actually will start to dissipate so usually a few hours up to 12 hours like the next day is the best time to eat that lovely sauce and now let's look at number three demonstration number three the third form of the custard is now the very thick one like a paste it is the pastry cream the milk is on the stove with the vanilla flavored milk exactly the same thing two egg yolk same as before 50 grams of sugar and now we've got an additional ingredients a bit of flour and cornstarch to thicken the whole mix so what we're gonna do same as before we're gonna put the eggs and sugar break everything and whisk until it's a little bit pale all done so this is exactly what we've done before with the sweet vanilla cassette but here because we want to really have a thick paste we're gonna add 25 grams it's a mix of flour and cornstarch that we're gonna mix in our egg and sugar mix okay so very gently you're gonna mix to have a really thick paste okay and that's going to tell you that already we're in for something thick okay you can see the consistency there that's what you need same as before I've already filtered my milk in here and we're gonna add a little bit first not because we're gonna cook the egg this time but because it is such a thick mixture with the flour and the cornstarch that you really want to make sure you grab everything and you don't have any clumps forming in your mixture okay A bit like a like a crab batter so the initial step you take everything you make sure it's nice and creamy nice and smooth and then you continue bit by bit you can add and you're gonna mix okay all right so we're back on the stove we're gonna do the exact same thing as with the vanilla custard I've got all my mixture on here and I'm gonna pour everything back in there's really some vanilla at the at the bottom of the bowl so make sure you put everything at once like this to get everything in okay this is with the heat off okay you first put everything in the pan then medium Heat and a little bit like the vanilla custard we're gonna keep on whisking but you're gonna see that what's gonna happen is totally different so the big difference here you can see I didn't bother with the foam because we really want to cook the eggs for that pastry cream and because we've added flour and cornstarch you can see what's going to happen here I'm gonna even reduce the weight a little bit it's gonna thicken immediately after a few minutes but much much thicker than the classic vanilla custard okay so I'm gonna wait until this starts to bubble that means it boils you need to reach boiling point with that cream okay I'm not there yet now if you can see here see the bubbles it's Ridge boiling point I'm reducing my heat and I'm gonna do another minute on low heat steering constantly and then that's it all done I'm taking a rubber spatula heat proof I'm gonna Reserve this in a recipient and here we are these are the three forms of custard you absolutely must know same ingredients 2 eggs 50 grams of sugar and 250 meters of milk combined with a flavoring of choice here with the vanilla bean okay and as you can see three different result the first one using all egg the whole egg the egg white solidifies the mixture and here you see you're getting a pudding I keep on eating it you see you get a vanilla pudding that's delicious okay you ditch the egg whites you transform your custard into a semi-liquid kind of form with par cooked it over the stove and the egg yolks have part cooked and you got a delicious sauce you can use with cakes or anything this is also the base to make ice cream by the way the third one the pastry cream is when you want to use this as a filling for cakes for shoe Puffs for anything like that you add sunflower some cornstarch and look at this this is really really thick but this is yummy you put this into an eclair or super for even some cakes or it's really really good but anyway that completes what I wanted to tell you about disgusted Before Christmas very important Master these three ways same ingredients super simple technique and you can make lots and lots of desserts I will add some links in the video description to some older video that I've got uh on how to make dessert based on this but what I would advise is to check how dessert course where we have a whole chapter on custard and you're gonna get new videos with you know good angle recipe cards all the supporting materials all the explanation plus lots of other dessert now if you're in into learning that stuff go for the course if you're just randomly passing by check some of the links okay that's it for me I'll leave you with this array of custard and I'll see you all next week for another video take care all bye [Music] me [Music] ant [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]

Channel: French Cooking Academy

Views: 135,854

Keywords: french cuisine, french food, french food recipes, french cooking video, custard, how to make custard, baked custard, stirred custard, pastry cream, 3 varieties of custard, tutorial, video, online course, French cooking academy

Id: vCaPITa8QRc

Length: 18min 9sec (1089 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 24 2022