Custard

effort: 😫     reward: 😋😋

source: Personal recipe (see below)

comments:

If you have leftover egg yolks this is a really good way to use them up, so luxurious to pour over cakes and puddings!

For the quantities, just know that you use half and half milk and cream, you want 1 egg yolk per 100ml of milk/cream mixture, and 1/2 tsp cornstarch per dl (100ml) of milk/cream mixture. You can judge yourself how much powdered vanilla beans, 1/4 tsp is just an estimate. Same for the sugar. If you want to be fancy, you can use the seeds from a real vanilla bean in this, in which case I would let the milk mixture steep a bit for five minutes or so once you've heated it up, with the lid on. I find the vanilla bean powder is good enough though and much cheaper, especially if you're just using this to go on the side of the main dessert.

Recipe

Ingredients

• 150ml milk
• 150ml cream
• 1/4 tsp powdered vanilla beans
• scant 1/4 cup sugar
• 3 egg yolks
• 1.5 tsp cornstarch

Method

1. Heat the milk, cream, and vanilla bean powder in a small pan on the stove until just barely simmering (around 80 degrees C).
2. Briskly whisk together the egg yolks and sugar in a medium bowl.
3. While whisking, gradually pour the warm milk mixture into the egg yolk mixture.
4. Sift over the cornflour and whisk it in.
5. Use the same sieve to strain the mixture back into the saucepan, then continue to heat it gradually over a lowish heat, until it thickens and reaches a temperature of 82-84 degrees celcius.
6. Remove from the heat and allow to cool. Keeps in the fridge for maybe three or four days in a jar.