Stirred and Baked

Here begins our two part journey into the world of protein thickened custards both stirred and baked. On the 'stirred' agenda was your classic pour-on-apple-pie style custard (creme Anglaise) and representing the 'baked' were creme caramel, creme brulee and the big daddy of the custard world: pot au creme (pot of creme). This lesson has been split into two parts because the baked custards need to sit in the fridge for a good few hours (and preferably overnight) before they can be finished. To add to this, we were also being taught to make coulis and tuille biscuits to decorate our finished products tomorrow.

So, we spent our practical lesson time today cooking the creme Anglaise, caramel, brulee, coulis and a batter for the biscuits and tomorrow we get to do all the fun finishing touches (e.g. blowtorching our brulees). After spending a couple of hours cooking up these treats they were labelled, wrapped and put in the fridge. Painful as it was to to come home empty handed, the thought of tucking into them tomorrow is already making me drool slightly.

To add to this we even recieved what I am going to take as a compliment from the teaching chef. By which I mean he looked at the consistency of our creme anglaise and said "good". Perhaps not much to boast about, but a few other custards in the class had taken the unfortunate turn towards scrambled eggs. How our other custards will turn out tomorrow is yet to be seen. But, for now, I can sleep happy knowing that by some fluke I turned out a "good" creme Anglaise.