[food] I am seriously not yet bored of talking about custard

[kaberett]

Turns out me_and has two Yotam Ottolenghi cookbooks (Plenty and Plenty More, for those of you who care), probably acquired as gifts at some point, to which he'd been sort of oblivious up until I pounced on them on Monday night while we were working out where my boxes of books should live temporarily.

(He proceeded to go to one of the Ottolenghi restaurants on Tuesday night and really liked it; we'd walked past a different branch on Sunday and I'd pointed it out, and there was one just down the road from a gig he was going to, so he decided to give it a go.)

Ergo I have established that Ottolenghi, unlike basically every other recipe I've found during this particular set of experimentation, agrees with me about actually boiling the dairy (see also). (I note that he combines double cream and whole milk without any mention of the graininess I've noted on the coupe of occasions I've tried it. On the other hand, he's using about equal volumes, where I'm using maybe one fifth milk to double cream, so I'm inclined to ascribe it to that and move on. Unless, of course, it was simply that on occasions when I used milk I also added the sugar to the yolks too long before adding the dairy...)

Bringing the dairy actually to the boil has, in my experiments, been absolutely necessary to get the viscosity I was after without faffing around subsequently baking the custards. The Guardian explicitly insists that you must not allow the milk to boil (and again; and again; though oddly not in 2012, but that recipe doesn't use anything like enough egg yolk); ditto the BBC; and Delia; and so on and so forth. I had started to worry that there was some Well-Known Problem with boiling the dairy that made it even less acceptable than adding cornflour, despite the fact that it worked; I'm still unclear on why so many people say that one absolutely mustn't (perhaps it's about scalding the milk and the flavour changes associated therewith?), but finding someone who agrees with me on this is, as I say, gently reassuring.

Comments

[kaberett]

GOING TO SLEEP NOW

ps http://imgur.com/gallery/WTOLrsA

welcome to our house on Maple Avenue, see how we polish and we shine

[vass]

Oh my God, it's my parents' decor. ALL OF IT. (Except for the accent throw pillows. That's me. Some are handmade, some are dinosaurs and robots. And instead of bottles of Pellegrino, they would do tap water but in a horrifyingly expensive designer pitcher that's a conversation piece.)

Especially the whole part of having to pretend to people you are supposedly friends with that you are refined, while simultaneously acting like this isn't refinement, it's just how everyone is except for those unRadchaai other people who don't understand the importance of little wooden bowls of stuffed olives and roast almonds with your pre-dinner drinks.

tbf, the hardcover books everywhere are because they (and I), um, read books? And the lemons were because they had a lemon tree. (This doesn't explain the little wooden bowl of tomatoes or the ceramic dish of nectarines, though.)

And there is nothing wrong with any of this except for the cultural narrative that people who enjoy these things or pretend to are superior to people who eat Chinese takeaway from the carton and drink diet Coke while watching Law and Order and reblogging memes, or who like ice cream that does not contain burned figs or macadamias. </vendaai>

[jelazakazone]

We ate at one of his restaurants in Notting Hill before we knew anything about him. IT WAS DELICIOUS!

[kaberett]

:D So delighted you enjoyed it! I've been following him for ages, basically since he started writing for the Guardian (it's the paper my parents get; I'm vegetarian; he was writing a vegetarian recipes column for them for a very long time). Still haven't eaten at any of his restaurants, but I'm looking forward to trying them out :-)

[syderia]

I think that the problem with boiling milk might be the fact that boiling milk left unattended even a few seconds can turn into a geyser of foaming scalding milk trying to escape the pot.

[damerell]

This. I used to boil milk regularly, and it's perfectly edible, it's just that milk bubbles have enough structural integrity that if you turn your back for two seconds it wants to leap out of the saucepan and say hello.

[kaberett]

I mean, if you're making custard the tedious way you're setting up to not turn your back for more than two seconds anyway, but in fact there's a pretty noticeable change in flavour if you let milk come to the boil -- I prefer it, A really doesn't, and consensus appears to be that people in general don't. (Something something speed of Maillard reactions something?) Which would sort of suggest you'd get a similar set of changes in higher-fat-content dairy products, but...?