Custard

Custard can be used in many ways, so the recipe may slightly vary. If you cook according to any other recipe from my website, use the amount of ingredients that was published there.

The “right” recipe of custard is made of ingredients that I mention first. You can replace them with ingredients listed in parentheses, but in this case your custard will have a different taste. This taste is not worse, it’s just different.

There are some special tricks in cooking custard, but with help of modern technologies we’ll easily cook custard together. This is maximum simplified recipe of custard that requires no special skills and patience. Let’s start.

Ingredients (you will get 600-750 ml of custard):

• 0,5 l of milk (2,5-4% of fat)
• 4 egg yolks (can be replaced with 2 eggs of medium size, custard with eggs will have insignificant egg flavour)
• 100 g of sugar (when custard will be boiling, taste it – you still have an opportunity to make it sweeter)
• 35 g of corn starch (can be replaced with 40 g of wheat flour; egg yolk+starch custard and egg+flour custard have different tastes)
• 2,5 tsp of vanilla sugar (can be replaced with ~0,25 tsp of vanillin + 2,5 tsp of sugar; those who like to suffer while cooking may take a vanilla bean, open it, scramble seeds out and boil vanilla bean and seeds in milk for 30 min. Later vanilla milk should be filtered through a sieve and cooled down to room temperature, also 2,5 tsp of simple sugar should be added to custard to keep the balance)
• 30 g of butter for a custard that will be baked, or 100 g of butter for a custard that will be used cold.

Equipment:

• Hand blender (shaft with blades & shaft with whisk).
• Spatula with flat end, so you can easily scoop the bottom of your pan while cooking.
• Non-stick pan – otherwise custard will stick and burn. Some say that steel casserole is ok – my IKEA stainless steel casserole has spoiled all the custard. So it’s better to use any non-stick frying pan with small and thick bottom, and if all ingredients don’t fit, just divide them in 2-3 portions.

Instructions

1. Take butter out of fridge – it should become soft while you are cooking the rest of ingredients.

2. Add the rest of ingredients to a pan (starting with yolks, so you can easily break them) and blend them well with a blender.

3. Put your pan on a stove, medium-low heat. You should constantly stir the blend. When the custard became thick, reduce the heat and boil it 2 min. constantly stirring. While you are busy with stirring thick custard – taste it. If it tastes sweet enough, think of what you are using it for – if you use it together with sweet dough, that’s all right. If you use custard with unsweet dough – add more sugar.

4. Take blender (shaft with blades) and blend custard to break possible lumps.

If you are obsessed with smooth texture you may filter custard stirring it through a sieve (I never needed a sieve, ‘cause my blender had done its job perfectly).

5. a) If you make custard that will be exposed to high temperatures – add 30 g of butter to hot custard and blend it one more time. Custard is ready.

b) If you intend to produce custard for cold use (f.e. for Napoleon cake), you need to cool it down. The problem is that a «skin» is building on the surface of custard as a side effect of cooling down, so I can suggest you to pour some cold water in a sink and put a pan with custard there. Stir custard ~3 min. until it cools a bit down.

Then put warm custard in blender’s glass and put a plastic bag (or a plastic wrap) right on custard’s surface to prevent it from drying.

When custard has cooled down, dice soft butter, add it to custard and whip it with blender (whisk-shaft) until mixture becomes homogeneous, ~2 min. Custard is ready. This custard can’t be heated as all the butter will melt and leak.

Custard can be stored in a fridge for 5-7 days.