New Year Dessert – Maple Pots de Creme

This dessert is subtle but delicious. The maple is almost a background note, floating lightly and delicately in the rich pudding.
By Sara Clevering

I always hesitate a bit about custard – not because I’m worried about the classic concerns, such as a glum pudding that resembles runny scrambled eggs (though I worry about that too) or that comes out overcooked (also angst-inducing)–but because it feels a bit profligate to use all those egg yolks. I feel bad wasting whites, so they just build up in my freezer.

Yes, the guilt. (What is that old saw about women feeling needlessly guilty all the time?) My husband, who is very encouraging of my making of custard, has been trying to convince me this is silly and to just make some already. (Might I note that he also is blissfully unaware of my constant reshuffling of the fridge, shifting expiring items forward and sliding unopened milk cartons and orange juices jugs towards the rear).

Much as some of us buy new gym clothes to encourage us to work out (with not always stellar effect) I not-so-recently bought some miniature cocotte pots at Williams Sonoma’s (ahem) Christmas clearance sale (ahem) last January. (Another takeaway from this is to never doubt the power of the words “50% off already reduced prices.” Please note I was only seduced by very deep discounting: I don’t want you to think I spent the originally stickered $50 each).

And while you might think the fact that I had to pull those stickers off of them last week to make this custard could be the irrefutable proof that they were an unwise impulse buy, I have no regrets. They are just too charming. You know how it goes with things in miniature. And in my defense, it could have been worse. I could have decided I needed a kitchen blowtorch for creme brulee while I was at it. (Oddly, my husband thinks this would be a sensible purchase. This seems to beg another cliché about men and fire).

Now that this preamble is out of the way, on to the custard.

I can’t help but love this whole genre: creme caramels, pots de creme, crema catalana, flan, puddings…I went through a period where I just kept ordering creme brulees on the restaurant menu, until I realized I was becoming far too predictable and it was time to stop neglecting the other desserts out there. But one resists change: if dessert is about comfort, it’s hard to get more at that essence than this.

With just three components, using good ingredients matters, as does technique.  I used my favorite local Berkshire Jersey cream and local maple syrup. (Sadly, my source for free-range eggs has dried up, as chickens don’t lay as much when the days are shorter).

As for the technique, here’s a few comments of my own. You’ll need to place your custard cups in a water bath: set your filled cups in a large cake pan, and then fill up about an inch or so with hot water. Make sure it’s hot, or it will never finish cooking (as I learned with a bad bread pudding episode). And make sure not to add too much water, or you risk splashing yourself–ouch–or your custards–sniff–with it when you go to remove the finished product from the oven. (Again, I learned the hard way). A hot water bath ensures your custards bake gently, resulting in a creamy, gliding texture.

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The other potential misstep is making a custard that more closely resembles oversweetened, runny scrambled eggs. The same principle of the water bath applies: You want to be sure you do not allow the yolks to cook too quickly when they first come into contact with your hot milk or cream. Temper the eggs by stirring only a bit of the hot cream into your eggs, whisking well to prevent lumps. Add a bit more, whisk, and then you can finally completely combine all the cream – but keep whisking! Tempering merely means bringing two items of differing temperatures to the same temperature (it’s often done with chocolate as well).

As further insurance, strain your custard mixture through a fine mesh sieve. This will strain out any large cooked egg particles, as well as those stringy fibrous bits of egg white that can cling to even a well-separated yolk. (The technical name is chalazae, but please don’t ask me how to pronounce it).

This dessert: subtle but delicious. The maple was almost a background note, floating lightly and delicately in the rich pudding. The custard tasted almost nutty to me at first, which was startling, but then made perfect sense: why else would maple pair so pleasingly with nuts, from pecans to walnuts?