Recipe Junction

Our Favorite Recipes'

Puddings and custards, silky goodness with every bite

Puddings and custards, by any name, deliver silky goodness with every bite

Here's a riddle: What is rich and creamy, comes in a variety of flavors (chocolate and vanilla are among the most common), is eaten with a spoon, is served at room temperature or chilled, and is disarmingly easy to prepare?

Custard gets an elegant treatment at Market Restaurant in Del Mar, where pastry chef James Foran tops a silky Butterscotch Pot de Crème with chocolate-covered puffed rice and whipped cream.

For this version of panna cotta, a pudding-type dessert firmed with gelatin, Foran uses saffron as a flavoring and serves a roasted strawberry and rhubarb compote on the side.

Dress up a caramel custard with sorbet, raspberries and mint.

Pudding, you say? Or maybe you're thinking crème brulée? Sophisticated diners might answer panna cotta or pot de crème. But wait a minute, what about flan, or better yet, just plain old custard?

Truth is, you would be correct with any one of those responses. While there is no one simple definition that encompasses the befuddling variety of puddings and custards that have become a mainstay on restaurant dessert menus, they all share a smooth, silken texture that makes them natural crowd pleasers.

What differentiate these creamy confections from one another are the thickening agents that give them body and the way in which they are cooked – or not.

While many of our earliest memories of this dessert genre come by way of boxed instant puddings, don't ever confuse those powder-based preparations courtesy of My-T-Fine and Jell-O with the real thing.

Eggs, sugar and cream or milk are the staples of most pudding like desserts, and while the preparation seems rather basic for so elegant a result, there is plenty of room for innovation and variety.

Vanilla, chocolate and butterscotch are common varieties, but infusions of various flavors, such as orange, lemon, cinnamon, espresso, ginger, even saffron, can turn an ordinary dessert into something much more exotic.

“Everyone always says, 'Puddings and custards, oh, they're comfort foods,' and so much of what makes a food comforting is texture,” says New York-based cookbook author Dorie Greenspan, whose “Baking: From My Home to Yours” has a whole section devoted to puddings and custards. “Puddings have this fabulous texture. They just feel so good in your mouth, and you can slip them and slide them through your teeth and no one knows you're doing it.

DETAILS Puddings and custards are very similar in some ways but are distinguished from one another by how they are cooked and what thickeners are used. Both categories typically rely on a base of cream and/or milk, sugar and eggs. Puddings, which are cooked on the stove top and are thickened with a starch, can include panna cotta, traditional chocolate and vanilla pudding, and crème anglaise. Custards, which tend to be richer, are typically baked in the oven in a water bath and include such desserts as pot de crème, flan and crème caramel.

“It's really an easy class of desserts, and any time you're warming milk or cream, it's an opportunity for infusions. Once you learn to make it, you can have a house specialty that's all yours.”

San Diego pastry chef James Foran of Market Restaurant in Del Mar believes that a dessert menu should always include at least one offering with a “silky texture,” whether it's a panna cotta (Italian for cooked cream) or some kind of pudding or pot de crème, usually a denser, rich custard baked in the oven.

“When I go out to dinner with my mom, who lives in New York, she likes crème brulée because she associates it with being a kind of fancier dessert,” said Foran, a native New Yorker. “For people who dine out a lot and who are foodies, yeah, it has become a bit of a cliche, but for people who don't dine out a lot, they appreciate it on the menu.”

Oftentimes how a dessert is named on a menu can be what ultimately seduces a diner to try something, Foran admits. Pudding or custard may sound pedestrian, but call it “pot de crème” or dress it up as a “vanilla bean custard,” and suddenly the dessert sounds much more tantalizing.

At Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles, for example, the tremendously popular butterscotch budino is really a pudding, but Italian budino seems to roll off the tongue much more fluidly than “pudding.”

Dessert divisions

For simplicity's sake, think of these creamy desserts as falling into two broad categories: puddings and custards. Puddings are cooked on the stove top, have as their base cream or milk and eggs, and are typically thickened with some sort of starch, like flour or cornstarch.

Desserts such as panna cotta, which get their jiggly structure from gelatin, and the more saucy crème anglaise, belong in the pudding genre. They are much less time-consuming to prepare because they set up in the refrigerator instead of being baked in the oven.

Custards, which can include flan, crème brulée and crème caramel (lacquered on the top and sides with golden caramel), rely more heavily on eggs, as well as baking at low temperatures in a warm-water bath, to give them structure.

Homemade ice cream usually starts with a custard base that is then frozen.

While the pot de crème is typically categorized as a custard, dessert guru Nick Malgieri insists it is never baked.

“A pot de crème is a very rich custard cream without a starch thickener that's poured into a mold and then set,” explained Malgieri, director of baking programs at the New York-based Institute of Culinary Education. “If it's baked, it's not a real pot de crème.”

As for the term pudding, Malgieri rejects it as ill-suited for what we Americans have come to know as a creamy comfort dessert.

“Pudding is very sloppy terminology,” he said. “To a British person, it can be any kind of sweet served after a meal. It originally was something that was steamed, boiled or baked – like a plum pudding – so it had a makeup and texture that was like a cake but softer and moister.”

Whatever the definition, technique and patience are essential in transforming these desserts into the luscious, velvety creations we expect them to be.

Whether you're using the stove top or the oven to prepare a pudding or custard, there are ways to ensure that your finished product is lump-free. When cooking a pudding mixture on the stove, you must take care to control the heat and stir constantly to avoid curdling the eggs.

To ensure an extra smooth texture, Greenspan likes to give the pudding base a few whirls in the food processor both before cooking and after. Foran favors an immersion blender. And always strain the mixture to remove any globules of cooked egg.

“The biggest thing with making a custard is to cook low and slow,” said Foran. “You can't rush it. Custard is all about texture; if it's curdled it's absolutely disgusting. I like to bake them at no hotter than 300 degrees, cover them tightly with aluminum foil, and a really important thing is to not check it every 10 minutes.”

For neophytes, keep it simple by first trying a basic pudding recipe, and you will be rewarded rather quickly for your efforts. Chances are you will swear off those instant versions of your youth forevermore.

Custards to try:

ADD THESE LINKS when created

Butterscotch Pots de Creme
Saffron Panna Cotta With Roasted Strawberry and Rhubarb Compote
Malibu Rum Crème Caramel

Prior | Submit your recipe | Next

Add to Your Social Bookmarks: Del.icio.us Digg Furl Reddit Simpy Spurl Y! MyWeb - StumbleUpon