Ingredients: vanilla bean, whole milk, large egg yolks, granulated sugar, corn starch · 30 min cook time · 285kcal · ~₩9,000
Instructions
1. Grab one vanilla bean and scrape it up. Split the vanilla bean pod, separate it out, and scrape some of the seeds out so they can infuse more easily into the milk.
2. Into a medium saucepan, add 2 cups of whole milk. Add your vanilla pod and the seeds to the milk. This will infuse as it warms up and form a beautiful vanilla milk tea.
3. Transfer this to your stove now. Place it over medium heat and bring it to a simmer. It should be 4 to 8 minutes depending on your stove.
4. Separate 6 large egg yolks from the whites. You can save your egg whites for an egg white omelet, you can make a meringue, they freeze so you can hold them for later.
5. To the egg yolks, add 2/3 cup of granulated sugar. Sprinkle it over your eggs.
6. Grab a whisk. Mix this up until it's nice and smooth and you have a beautiful lighter color.
7. While you were doing that, your milk came to a simmer. It's nice and steamy and smells amazing. Set this aside to cool for about 15 minutes. It is too hot to touch our egg yolks right now. We also want to infuse that vanilla flavor into the milk, so it needs a little bit of time.
8. Add 1/4 cup of corn starch to the egg mixture. Sift and whisk so that no lumps remain.
9. Remove the vanilla bean from your milk. This can be popped into some sugar for vanilla sugar if you want. It's not garbage.
10. Grab half a cup of your hot milk and drizzle this in as you whisk vigorously. This is tempering the mixture and just making sure that the eggs don't curdle. We want a silky, melt-in-your-mouth, luscious custard, not sweet vanilla scrambled eggs.
11. Now that we've thinned out and warmed our egg mixture, we can add the rest of the milk in while whisking.
12. You might have seen some chunks of the vanilla pod coming out with the milk. We don't want that in our custard. So, grab a fine mesh sieve and pour this back into the pot through the sieve. All this junk does not go in.
13. We're going to take our pot back onto the burners and pop it over medium heat, along with a whisk. We're going to gently whisk continuously, but I've switched to a narrow whisk, also known as a French whisk. Before, I was using a balloon. This just gets the corner of the pot and we don't have as much overcooked, congealed stuff.
14. Continue whisking gently for 5 to 8 minutes until it's thickened up and starts to bubble. You will see a very noticeable difference that happens like that, so fast. So, it'll go from being the same, the same, the same, nothing's happening, nothing's happening to completely done.
15. This happened so fast. Now, you have a lovely custard. If you tasted this right now, you would say, "John, this is delicious." And I would say, "Hold onto your hat, it's going to get so much better." This custard has a lovely flavor, but you know what we need to really taste it is a little bit of fat. Just 1 tablespoon of cold butter, plopped right in, will change everything. This will dissolve on your tongue now, and the way it hits your taste buds will make it so much better, I can't even describe. Just stir until the butter is all melted.
16. As this butter melts in, you can see the texture changing. It's relaxed, it looks more silky, and it tastes more silky as well. Pastry cream is, of course, a French invention, and its first mention is in 1691, but it really becomes popular in the 18th century when you have the refinement of French pastries. So now, once choux, which is a lovely kind of dough that you use to make eclairs and cream puffs, gets paired with this pastry cream, magic happens. You get the cream puffs, you get the eclairs, the mille-feuille, all sorts of cakes, pastries, and tarts get filled with this pastry cream because it's lovely and thick, it really holds its texture, and it pairs so beautifully with other things.
17. Once chilled, you can remove your cover and notice that you have an unusable blob. So, we have to make this supple and lovely again. You could use a whisk, but it's much easier to use an electric hand mixer on low. We're going to agitate this a little bit, but it'll become nice and silky again, but still be beautiful and thick. Really just 30 seconds of mixing is all you need. You want to break up those bonds holding it together. It should still be really nice and thick and creamy though.
18. If you wanted this to have more volume and be a bit lighter in flavor, you could add 1 cup of heavy whipped cream that's whipped up to nice stiff peaks. That's if you're going to enjoy it right away, and it's now called cream diplomat. If you want to use this in something that's going to sit for a bit, take 1 teaspoon of gelatin with 3 tablespoons of water, melt it in the microwave for 30 seconds, stir that into the cream pat right now, and then fold in your whipped cream, and you'll have a lovely lightened custard. So good.
19. You now have a perfect pastry cream, which is amazing for filling all kinds of desserts. As a special treat, I'm making a batch of eclairs later today. So, my pastry cream is going to be chilled and ready to pipe once my choux comes out of the oven. I just want to show you how lovely this is because when you make a mille-feuille, you can pipe beautiful little dollops of pastry cream, and they kind of hover between your layers of puff pastry. Take a look. Lovely little dollops. And just like that, your pastry cream is ready to use as you desire. You could even eat it by the spoonful. This stuff is beyond delicious. Creamy, dreamy, cool, vanilla amazingness. It is so lovely and pairs perfectly with all kinds of things.