Flan Recipe

The Food Scavenger rails against her own inorganization. Recipes swim through e-mails and txt files in mysterious folders like so many tiny tadpoles waiting for their spring of froggy adulthood. One day, the recipes shall escape their digital confines to emerge three-dimensional and edible in reality.

Instead of letting them be digital riff-raff, the Food Scavenger now has this wonderful blog to consolidate her favorite recipes instead of using search on google, on Yahoo Mail, on Gmail, on Hotmail to finally find a recipe.

So, today the Food Scavenger decided to try out Heidi Swanson's chocolate puddle cookies recipe. Lo and behold, Food Scavenger has no walnuts, but that's alright. She has plenty of peanuts.

Then, Food Scavenger realized the cookies would leave her with a veritable mountain of a molehill of egg yolks. What to do with so many egg yolks?

It's summer! What else to do but make flan?

Thus, began the Food Scavenger's hunt through her various e-mails for her flan recipe.

Flan
6 eggs (for an eggier version, use 7 eggs; for a creamier, richer version, replace whole eggs with egg yolks)
3 c. of milk
1 c. sugar
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

Preheat oven to bake at 325 degrees Fahrenheit.

Making the caramel:

Melt 1/2 c. of sugar over medium to high heat until caramellized. Food Scavenger likes a dark brandy color, when the sugar caramellizes to a smoky, dark flavor. It's a habitual Vietnamese taste: dark, smoky.

Pour into a rectangular or circular mold with a volume of at least 6 cups (measure by pouring water into the mold).

Place mold into a pan, which will hold eventually hold hot tap water (or microwaved water).

Making the custard portion:

Gently beat eggs. Then pour milk in. Then add 1/2 c. sugar. Then add vanilla extract. Stir until ingredients well incorporated into a homogeneous mixture (a pale, creamy yellow).

Now pour custard through a sieve into the mold with caramellized sugar in it. By this time, the caramel might have hardened and may crack under the cool temperature of the custard mixture. Do not be alarmed. When this goes into the oven, the caramel will melt anyway to be incorporated into the custard, becoming the flan that we all know and love.

In the water pan, fill the pan with hot tap water or microwaved water until the mold containing the flan is submerged beneath one inch of hot water.

Now, carefully transfer water pan with custard mold in it into the oven to bake for an hour.

Sometimes, an eggy film may form on top of your flan. You can place aluminum foil on top of flan during baking to ensure this does not happen.

To test that your flan is done, run a knife through it. If the knife comes out clean, your flan is done.

When your flan is done, remove it from the oven and place it on a rack to cool. Then, move the flan to the refridgerator to chill. A few hours should be enough for the flan to set. The longer you allow it to set, the more incomporated the caramel portion in the custard.

Sometimes, the Food Scavenger makes flan in the morning so that the caramel is fully absorbed by the flan as an after-dinner dessert.