Creme Brulee is one of the classic desserts of French cuisine. It is a baked custard (the name literally translates from french to “burnt cream“), which after cooling is coated in sugar and either placed under a broiler or torched with a blowtorch to caramelize the sugar, making it crunchy and flavourful. It can be sublime, or it can be a sticky, burned, wet mess. You can make a beautiful, perfect custard, bake it slowly and carefully, and ruin the entire thing when it comes time to burn the top. Many things can go wrong, from the sugar not being fully melted and caramelized, to the custard getting too hot for too long and separating, to there being a syrupy mess on top.
The most important thing to remember is that sugar draws in moisture from the air, which means that if you burn the brulees too long before they are served (holding anything over 15 minutes is really pushing it), the perfect caramel you just made will melt into syrup.
The next thing that can go wrong is the burning itself. As previously mentioned, there are two main ways to burn the sugar; using a blow torch, or under a broiler or salamander. Both have pros and cons. A blow torch will give you more control, enabling you to direct the heat exactly where it’s needed; but it is also a specialized tool that you may not have any other use for. A broiler will not provide you such control and if not sufficiently heated, it may take so long to caramelize the sugar that the custard gets too hot and separates. On the other hand, most people have a broiler, and it has many other uses.
There is some debate about the perfect amount of sugar to use on a brulee. Some people say that the amount that the surface can hold when turned upside down, others say that a heaped mound in the middle works best. I’ve found that somewhere in between gives a beautiful crackling top. Put a lot of sugar on the surface, roll it around to make sure that there is no custard left exposed as this will burn and blacken when torched, and pour some of the remaining sugar off, leaving about a teaspoon to tablespoon in the ramekin, which is then re-distributed around the surface. The next step is to wipe the rim of the ramekin clean, removing any sugar that happened to stick to it, as this will get burned on, look messy and be hard to clean.
Now it’s time to burn. Using a blow torch, start at the sides, and working in a slow inward spiral, move the torch around the dish just before the flame turns the sugar to a golden caramel as the residual heat will continue change the colour, and even if you’re a little fast, you can always go back over it again, but you can’t un-burn it. If using a broiler or salamander, it will probably have hot-spots, so rotate as often as necessary to get an even colour. An important thing to remember is that the broiler should be as hot as it can get, to cook the sugar quickly without doing too much damage to the custard beneath it.
