ChefSteps

Want to learn more about eggs? Check our deep dive into the most versatile ingredient in the kitchen.

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What’s in an egg? This complex ingredient has many culinary uses, from emulsifying to gelling and foaming. Here’s how to make the most of eggs in your kitchen.

Cracking the Egg: Understanding This Incredible Ingredient

All About Eggs

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Custard Parametric

The Parametric

The Custard Contenders

Crème anglaise is a stirred custard that’s often used as a sweet sauce for desserts; it also can be frozen and churned into ice cream. Made up entirely of yolks, the egg component adds flavor and richness, but it functions primarily as a thickener. Gently heating the combined mixture to [f 180] produces a viscous liquid that remains pourable even when chilled. 

Custard fluidity: Pourable

Custard target temperature: [f 180]


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Crème Anglaise

[link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/creme-anglaise Crème Anglaise]

Hollandaise is one of the French mother sauces, and it owes its existence to the miracle that is a whole egg. Unlike crème anglaise, hollandaise uses whole eggs, and they primarily function as stabilizers for the emulsion of butter and lemon juice.

Hollandaise is a very temperamental sauce; the emulsion needs to be at the right temperature, and it must contain the right amount of water, otherwise it will break. 

Custard fluidity: Pourable

Custard target temperature: [f 167]


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Overcooked hollandaise sauce on your eggs Benedict? Never again. It’s easy to get great results with sous vide cooking. We’ll show you how.

Bright, Fluffy Whipped Hollandaise

Egg White Hollandaise

This is a hollandaise that is easy to make, fluffy, and requires only 4 ingredients. Rather than requiring a copper bowl and hand whisking, this hollandaise uses a blender and one bowl. It is just as delicious as traditional hollandaise, if not better.

An Instant Way to an Even Better Hollandaise

[link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/an-instant-way-to-an-even-better-hollandaise Hollandaise]

Lemon curd is traditionally a mixture of egg yolks, sugar, butter, and lemon juice. The egg yolks are primarily included for texture and stabilization. As with a crème anglaise, they thicken the mixture when heated, but the higher proportion of yolks to other ingredients also means that the egg yolks will help the mixture set into a weak gel.

Our recipe is atypical in that it includes gelatin, which makes the mixture gel more easily. However, the egg yolks play the same part, and you have to be careful about heating the mixture so that it thickens without curdling.

We thought it was interesting that even though hollandaise and lemon curd are brought to the same temperature to activate the eggs thickening power, the different ingredient ratios yield vastly different textural results.

Custard fluidity: Pipeable

Custard target temperature: [f 167]


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Bright and lovely, our Lemon Curd recipe teaches you to make a terrific topping for desserts, fish dishes, and more.

Lemon Curd

[link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/lemon-curd Lemon Curd]

Pastry cream is a starch-stabilized custard: Whole eggs are combined with dairy, sugar, and cornstarch and brought to a boil.

In pastry cream, eggs add flavor, silkiness, richness, and color, but the role they play in giving pastry cream its texture works in conjunction with the starch. Temperature control is crucial, as you have to temper the eggs to ensure they don’t scramble before the temperature of the liquid reaches the gelatinization point of cornstarch. Once the cornstarch has gelatinized, which also helps prevent the eggs from curdling, you then have to maintain a high temperature until amylase, an enzyme present in egg yolks that will degrade the starch, is deactivated.

But once you do all that, pastry cream is incredibly versatile. You can chill it and it will set; you can pull it out of the fridge, whip it, and it’ll flow, making it easy to pipe into tart shells or spread into pie crusts.

Custard fluidity: Pipeable

Custard target temperature: [f 212]


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Pastry cream recipe (crème pâtissière)

Pastry Cream

[link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/pastry-cream Pastry Cream]

Chawanmushi has the lowest ratio of egg to other ingredients of all these recipes. The egg is used almost exclusively for the fact that it can create a super soft–set custard, and the ratio of egg to <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/sous-vide-dashi-7ed3735a-bfdd-4b59-9cf0-2a5d6422a198">dashi</a>, which provides most of the flavor, uses just about as little egg as possible.

This is a delicate dish, and it requires delicate temperature control. Cooked at too high a temperature—or for too long—and the custard becomes more dense and watery, as the proteins contract

This is the only custard in our comparison that contains no dairy at all.

Custard fluidity: Barely set, very jiggly

Custard target temperature: [f 176]


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Sous vide Dungeness crab chawanmushi recipe (savory crab custard).

Dungeness Crab Chawanmushi

Sous Vide Chawanmushi

[link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/sous-vide-chawanmushi Chawanmushi]

If you say “custard,” a lot of people would immediately think of crème brûlée, flan, or pot de crème. These are iconic custard desserts. What was interesting to us when comparing these custards was how similar these three icons are in their preparation.

Crème brûlée is a rich dessert, but it isn’t quite as rich as flan or pot de crème. It’s a little less eggy, a little less creamy, and a little less sweet (if you don’t count the crackling burnt sugar lid). And while it’s cooked to about the same temperature as pot de crème, it isn’t quite as thick.

Flan distinguishes from both crème brûlée and pot de crème because it is served unmolded. Incorporating whole eggs instead of just egg yolks in the base gives the custard more structure. The proteins in the egg whites, cooked to a slightly higher temperature, not only make it jiggly and cohesive enough to invert onto a plate without breaking apart, they also give it a much eggier flavor. 

Custard fluidity (Crème Brûlée): Set, creamy

Custard target temperature: [f 176]


Custard fluidity (Flan): Set, jiggly

Custard target temperature: [f 194]


Custard fluidity (Pot de Crème): Set, creamy

Custard target temperature: [f 176]



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Make flan for a crowd (or just your special someone). With our sous vide recipe, cooking perfect custard is a cinch. 

Flan (Crème Caramel)

Rich and creamy Chocolate Pots de Crème are the pudding snack cups of your childhood—only all grown up. Easy and delicious, they’re sure to be a hit.

Sous Vide Chocolate Pot de Crème

Pot de Crème sounds like a fancy dessert recipe, but it’s easy to perfect this lovely custard when you cook it sous vide. We’ll show you how.

Pot de Crème

With the power of sous vide, perfect Crème Brûlée is simple to achieve every time. Cooking for a crowd? It’s as easy to make 20 desserts as it is two!

Sous Vide Crème Brûlée

[link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/foolproof-cracklin-creme-brulee  Crème Brûlée], [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/flan-creme-caramel Flan], [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/pot-de-creme Pot de Crème]

The Macau egg tart features a thick-set sliceable custard full of eggy flavor, set in a Chinese-style puff pastry that’s got layers for days. Part of the trick of baking the pastry is it needs to bake at a relatively high [f 400] to “puff.” That is why the custard used in it is a pastry cream: a starch-thickened custard that’s completely cooked, cooled, then whipped before being added to a puff pastry shell, which makes it resilient enough to handle extended baking at a relatively high temperature.

Custard fluidity: Set, sliceable

Custard target temperature: [f 212]



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Chinese Macau-style egg custard tart (pastéis de nata) recipe.

Big Macau Egg Tart

[link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/big-macau-egg-tart Macau Egg Tart]

Quiche stands slightly apart from the rest of the custards in this analysis because a quiche is all about the eggs: You want their flavor front-and-center, and you want the firmly set texture that coagulated egg white proteins can provide. The other ingredients in a quiche—the dairy and, in the case of our <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/ultimate-quiche">Ultimate Quiche</a>, the Velveeta and Gruyère cheese—add richness and modify the texture of the cooked eggs, but they aren’t the focus.

Unlike the Macau egg tart, the quiche custard needs to be cooked gently; you can’t just slam it in a superhot oven since the eggs only have a slight buffer against curdling (the Velveeta). This is why it’s necessary to blind-bake the crust; you want to pull the quiche from the oven when the internal temperature of the custard at the quiche’s center hits [f 158], and let <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/carryover-cooking-why-you-should-let-meat-rest">carryover cooking</a> do its thing, so that the custard’s center “rests up” to [f 165]. If you don’t brown the crust fully before adding the custard, it’ll never get crispy and flaky by the time the custard is cooked.

Monitoring the temperature of the center of the quiche also gives you some assurance that the custard closer to the edges isn’t overcooked. The center of the quiche is the coolest part of the custard, and there’s a slowly rising temperature gradient from the center to the edges in every direction. If you pull the quiche when the center is at [f 158], you can be reasonably assured the edges haven’t turned into a leaden, scrambled mess.

Custard fluidity: Firmly set, sliceable

Custard target temperature: [f 165]



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Ultimate Cheese Quiche

[link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/ultimate-quiche Quiche]

What is a custard? Well, it’s complicated!Technically speaking, a custard is a liquid that has been thickened or set via the coagulation of egg protein. And while the ingredient lists for different custards might look super similar, small differences in ingredient ratios and preparation can yield wildly different results. Mix eggs, dairy, and sugar together and heat them up gently, and you can make crème anglaise, a custard sauce that’s pourable even when chilled; increase the proportion of dairy and heat the mixture in a ramekin to about the same temperature, hit the surface with a kitchen torch, and you’ve got crème brûlée.These vast differences in results are due to the fact that the egg is a culinary miracle. With a little encouragement and by applying heat precisely, cooks can use eggs to thicken delicious liquids, as with crème anglaise; transform them into pipeable, heat-stabilized gels, as is the case with pastry cream; or make an otherwise impossible emulsion of way-too-much-butter in way-too-little-lemon (hollandaise!), a standard feature on brunch menus all over the world.All of which is to say, custards seemed like a perfect candidate for parametric analysis. We compared 10 of our custard recipes to explore just a little bit of the egg’s enormous potential. We whittled down the candidates from a long list, and we stuck with custards that most people would immediately acknowledge are custards. (Are scrambled eggs a custard? We didn’t want to get into it.)We tasked Matthew Woolen with making them all, and we converted all the ingredient lists into baker’s percentages, with the quantity of eggs as the 100 percent value, noting any unique or interesting additions to the custard base, like Velveeta, gelatin, or cornstarch, and then we plugged them all into a chart so we could compare cooking methods, cooking temperatures, and textures.

Eggsamining Custards: A Parametric Analysis