Creme Brulee

One day last summer, Chris and I were perusing the isles of Costco and we stumbled upon a package of vanilla beans. For those of you who are familiar with this venerable spice pod it is ridiculously expensive- I believe we paid $20 for two vanilla beans at the grocery store. Anyway, this Costco pack had at least 10 beans in it and it was $20 so we popped it in our cart not even thinking about the fact that we had only really needed one vanilla bean one time in our 3 years of cooking together.

Fast forward to this summer, we are trying to use all these beans in various recipes before they go bad.

The first thing we made was a creme brulee and it was delicious. Chris actually made it, I just torched the sugar on top of the one I ate. There will be more vanilla bean inspired dishes to come in the next few months.

Ingredients

1/2 cup sugar
8 large egg yolks
2 cups heavy cream
1 vanilla bean

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Pour sugar into the egg yolks and beat the yolks until smooth. Scrape in the seeds from the vanilla bean.

Heat the heavy cream until almost simmering. Gradually add the heavy cream to the egg yolks while whisking vigorously. This will temper the eggs so that they do not curdle. Once all of the heavy cream has been added into the yolks, pour the mixture into 6-8 ramekins depending on size.

Place the ramekins in a baking pan. Pour enough hot water into the pan to come halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Bake just until the custard is set, but still jiggles in the center, approximately 40-45 minutes. Remove the ramekins from the pan and refrigerate for at least 2 hours prior to serving.

Before serving, pour about a teaspoon of sugar on the top of each custard. Using a torch, melt the sugar and form a crispy delicious caramelized sugar top.

recipe from vanilla bean packaging www.rodellevanilla.com