There is a basic pastry that everyone should make at home, the pastry cream recipe . If you have never dared to do it, you should know that you do not require any kitchen robot, not even an electric mixer, and even less magical powers. You only need a saucepan and some rods , and very few minutes! Preparing pastry cream is the easiest there is . Believe me! It's quick and easy, and with this recipe and a few basic tips for making it, you'll get a delicious pastry cream, with a creamy texture and that vanilla flavor that you'll fall in love with so much.

Pastry cream is a recipe that you can use in a multitude of sweet recipes : in cakes, tartlets, biscuits, with puff pastry, crêpes, millefeuille... Its use is really widespread, because both its flavor and texture are excellent in sweet recipes (either alone or accompanied by fruit, cream, chocolate...). That, of course, if you are able not to eat it beforehand by the spoonful!

Today we bring you a basic, easy and infallible recipe for you to prepare cream at home. With this step by step and the basic tips that you will see, you will get a pastry cream the first time!

Ingredients for making pastry cream

  • 500 ml of milk
  • 1 vanilla pod*
  • 100g of sugar
  • 40g of corn starch (Maicena)
  • 4 egg yolks

*In default of the vanilla bean, you can use a teaspoon of liquid vanilla extract. Purists will throw their hands up, but the results are excellent, as long as you use a quality extract (otherwise it will really ruin the result in flavor). Authentic Madagascar vanilla extract is a highly recommended option.

How to make pastry cream

De Buyer copper saucepan , Madagascar vanilla extract and Le Creuset ceramic tart pans

What utensils do you need?

Preparation

Preparation time: 15 minutes

  1. Put the milk in the saucepan together with the vanilla pod (without the seeds) and bring it to a boil. After a few seconds, remove the saucepan from the heat and reserve.
  2. Separate the yolks from the whites manually or with a white separator .
  3. In a bowl and with the help of some rods , mix the yolks with the sugar and cornstarch until everything is integrated.
  4. Remove the pod from the milk that you have previously reserved and add the milk to the mixture that you have prepared. You must do it little by little and without stopping stirring, until you get a homogeneous mixture.
  5. Put the mixture in the saucepan and return it to the fire, at a low temperature. Go stirring with some rods (be careful! It is important not to stop stirring, ball-tipped rods are a great tool in this case). After a few minutes you will see that it is thickening, and in a few more seconds you will see that the cream is ready.
  6. Remove from the heat, pour it into a bowl and cover it with film. The film must touch the cream, to avoid creating a scab.

Grades

  • With the amount of the indicated ingredients you will get 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 the 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 just have to try to warm the milk a bit, or add it little by little (add a few tablespoons first, and add it little by little from here on, stirring constantly), to prevent the mixture from taking too much temperature.
  • You can use the pastry cream directly in your recipes, warm or cold (for example, add it to a previously baked puff pastry tartlet) or you can add it to the doughs that have to go in the oven without any problem, either as a filling or as an exterior decoration ( the cream will keep wonderfully despite baking).
  • You can store the homemade pastry cream in the fridge 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 .

Recipes with easy cream

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