There is a basic baking recipe that everyone should make at home: custard . If you have never dared to make it, you should know that you do not need a food processor, not even an electric whisk, and even less magic powers. You only need a saucepan and a whisk , and very few minutes! Preparing custard is one of the easiest things there is . Believe me! It is easy and fast, and with this recipe and a few basic tips for making it, you will get a delicious custard, with a creamy texture and that vanilla flavor that we love so much.
Pastry cream is a recipe that you can use in a multitude of sweet recipes : in cakes, tarts, sponge cakes, with puff pastry, crêpes, mille-feuilles... Its use is really widespread, and both its flavour and texture are excellent in sweet recipes (either alone or accompanied by fruit, cream, chocolate...). That is, of course, if you can manage not to eat it by the spoonful first!
Today we bring you a basic, easy and foolproof recipe for making cream at home. With this step-by-step guide and the basic tips you'll see, you'll get a pastry cream on the first try!
Ingredients to make pastry cream
- 500ml of milk
- 1 vanilla pod*
- 100 g of sugar
- 40gr of corn starch (Maicena)
- 4 egg yolks
*In the absence of vanilla beans, you can use a teaspoon of liquid vanilla extract. Purists will be shocked, but the results are excellent, as long as you use a quality extract (otherwise it will really ruin the result in terms of flavour). Authentic Madagascar vanilla extract is a highly recommended option.
De Buyer copper saucepan , Madagascar vanilla extract and Le Creuset ceramic tartlet moulds
What utensils do you need?
- An egg white separator (optional)
- A bowl
- A saucepan
- A few hand rods
Preparation
Preparation time: 15 minutes
- Put the milk in the saucepan along with the vanilla pod (without the seeds) and bring to the boil. After a few seconds, remove the saucepan from the heat and set aside.
- Separate the yolks from the whites manually or with an egg white separator .
- In a bowl, using a whisk , mix the egg yolks with the sugar and cornstarch until everything is combined.
- Remove the milk pod that you reserved previously and add the milk to the mixture you have prepared. You should do it little by little and without stopping stirring, until you obtain a homogeneous mixture.
- Pour the mixture into the saucepan and return it to the heat at low temperature. Stir with a whisk (Note! It is important not to stop stirring, whisks with a ball tip are a great tool in this case). After a few minutes you will see that it is thickening, and in a few seconds you will see that the cream is ready.
- Remove from heat, pour into a bowl and cover with cling film. The cling film should touch the custard to prevent a crust from forming.
Grades
- With the quantity of ingredients indicated you will obtain about 650 gr of pastry cream , which is a generous amount. If you want to prepare less, you just have to reduce the ingredients proportionally.
- A common problem when preparing cream is that the yolks curdle when you add the milk to the mixture. This is due to the high temperature of the milk. To avoid this, you should try to warm the milk a little, or add it little by little (add a few spoonfuls first, and then add it little by little and stirring constantly), to avoid the mixture getting too hot.
- You can use the pastry cream directly in your recipes, warm or cold (for example, adding it to a previously baked puff pastry tartlet) or you can add it to pastries that need to be baked without any problem, either as a filling or as an exterior decoration (the cream will keep perfectly despite baking).
- You can store the homemade pastry cream in the refrigerator for 3 days.
Now that you know how to make a delicious pastry cream, you may be interested in seeing recipe ideas with pastry cream : here .
