Custard Test

For a while I have been wanting to get good at making baked egg custards without starch, a tricky process.

Here are the salient facts from On Food and Cooking:

Ingredients

• 250ml (1 cup) whole milk
• 30 grams (2 tbspns sugar
• 1-2eggs or 3-6 yolks-- egg whites = firm and glossy, egg yolks= rich and creamy

Cooking

Eggs set at 175F(80C) and curdle at 185F (85C).  Most people aim to take them out at 180F/83C.

You get them most of the way to this temperature by pouring the boiling hot milk slowly into the sugar and egg mixture while stirring, which usually ends up at 130F-150F.

Now it's all about slowly and reliably getting it all that extra 50F at the same time:

I have one cook book that suggests cooking in a convection oven at 200F (90C)

On Food and Cooking, and most other sources suggest placing the custard pans in warm water and then in a 300F-350F oven.  The water bath, if left uncovered, cannot rise above 180F because of evaporative cooling.

The Test:

Starting at the bottom right and moving clockwise, I have 2 yolks, 1 egg, 1 egg + 1 yolk, 2 eggs.  Can you spot which of these is a pastured egg and which are from Trader Joe's?

For flavoring I boiled my milk for 10minutes with a rooibos ginger chai mix, then strained it and measured 250ml into each bowl.

I then divided each mix between three muffin slots and placed the silicone muffin tins in a home made bain marie.  By this point the mixture has cooled a lot, so it actually took forever to cook!

The leftovers were all mixed together and placed in a bowl in my toaster oven at 90C.

The Results and Lessons Learned:

Starting at the top right and moving clockwise: 2 yolks, 1 egg, 1 egg + 1 yolk, 2 eggs.

First thing I learned is that I need to do a better job of marking which tins are which.  I may have confused the 2 yolk and 1 egg samples by messing up pan orientation, BUT since On Food and Cooking clearly states that a 2 yolk custard will be too soft to hold for outside it's tin while a 1 egg custard can, I am pretty sure which is which.

Things I learned.  I did NOT like the 2 egg custard, which was far too rubbery and stiff.  The 2 yolk was more like a delicate cream and would need to be cooked and served in a  ramekin.  I actually thought the 1 egg (which I expected to be deficient somehow was my favorite, being just set and still tasting creamy from the whole milk.  Most confusing was the 1egg + 1 yolk, which I expected to be richer than the 1 egg custard, but was also much firmer.

Conclusion:  I think 1 egg custards are a nice economical taste option if you don't want to do the classic 3 yolk.  Also, any recipe that suggests 2 eggs / cup of milk is going to give something very stiff.

Valuable lessons:

• This is the section where I document the many things that went wrong.
• Firstly, my custards took forever to cook, and lost some volume (which probably effected results) and got really obvious unpleasant skins on them. 
• Also, 3 of the 2 yolk custards were ruined by water from the bath getting in them (these were in flexible silicone muffin molds).
• All of the above can be solved by COVERING YOUR CUSTARD.  Not to future Danielle.  Do this!

Also, ratcheting down the oven temperature to 250F feels "safe" but actually just means a 40min process takes 2 hours.  Ditto with 200F sans water bath.  Here's how I'd cook these next time:

Set my oven to 350F and place a barbecue thermometer in the water bath.  If the water bath gets too/over 180F, lower the heat to 300F, but don't go lower than that.  Start checking the custards every 10min starting at 30min.

This was mostly an experiment, but some point soon I'll use this knowledge to actually bake a custard.