Creme Patisserie- Makes Everything Fabulous

This is worth learning- not difficult, the most rewarding building block of the pastry world, and delicious on its own.. It is simply a pudding, enriched with egg yolks and finished with butter. If quality had a flavor, this would be it- you can taste everything- creamy, rich, subtle. You will be unable to use packaged substitutes after trying this; it is so simple you will not need to.

We will need:

450 ml/ 2 C whole fresh milk

4 egg yolks

50 g/ 4 T corn starch

130 g/ 2/3 C sugar

pinch salt

vanilla, or better still a plumped bean to steep in the milk

50 g/ 4 tablespoons butter

Heat the milk to simmering in a heavy-bottomed pan, with the vanilla bean if you are using one. Beat the yolks, add the sugar slowly and carefully as you beat, and then the cornstarch and salt. Very slowly spoon warm milk into the yolk mixture, whisking as you do, to bring it slowly up totemperature. When you have added half of the milk ad the mixture is quite hot, you can add it all back into  the pan with the warm (not boiling) milk. Continue to whisk over medium heat- making sure the whisk makes contact with the bottom of the pan all over, until it thickens, which will happen all at once at the end. Keep whisking and let it nearly boil another minute. Remove from the heat, and genty whisk in the butter in small pieces, one at a time. Squeeze the seeds from the vanilla bean into the cream if you are using one, or add a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Pour through a fine-mesh strainer into a bowl (even with the most careful whisking) into a dish and cover with a round of non-stick parchment. Cool, then chill, then use as you like for instance in a creme chibouste to fill a meringue.

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Nothing Plain About Vanilla When You Make Your Own

Homemade vanilla extract is better than anything you can buy. It looks beautiful in its jar. You have liquor for essence, and seeds from the pods when you want a little black sparkle, and then the pods themselves to perfume your sugar. You will reach for it more often and your desserts will all be the finer for it- as a single note it is exotic and rich- nothing plain about it. With fruits, it brings out the floral perfume of their birth (it is itself a flower- the seed pod of an orchid).

This cherry tart is brightened with rich 
specks of vanilla.

More romance still- it marries the other flavors, buffing their rougher edges, and giving them a strong (discrete) velvety background to play on, especially chocolate:

How to make it? Just find a source of good fresh vanilla beans- a wholesale spice purveyor, not the ones sold in pairs in a glass tube- too expensive, and you can't smell them. At the store, when they open the container, it should knock you out. Heads should turn. Buy as many as you can afford, at least ten, more if you can- they won't spoil.

Now get a bottle of hard liquor- something respectable you would drink on its own, but not necessarily top shelf. I used whiskey here, but rum is also tasty. You could do vodka but I like to start out with something already golden. Put  the vanilla beans upright into a tall narrow jar, and fill it to the top with liquor. It will need a couple of  weeks to develop. use the liquid as you would any commercial vanilla extract. When you can see it- with fruits, with anything white (ice cream, panna cotta, cake frostings, pavlovas)- snip off the tip of a fat liquor soaked pod and drizzle in some syrupy paste filled with exotic-looking black specks.

Keep the pod in the liquor. Every now and then top up the liquor or add some fresh vanilla beans, or both.

It is an investment at the outset, but ultimately much more economical. 

Don't think of it as an ingredient so much as a lasting upgrade in the way you cook. The subtle perfume will delight everything it touches.

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