Food, Home & Lifestyle
Desserts: Pots de Crème
Lesson time 16:11 min
Pots de crème are small but extremely rich. Chef Keller discusses the importance of ingredient selection in this dish, and he explains the techniques for creating a creamy filling.
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Topics include: Desserts: Pots de Crème
Teaches Cooking Techniques III: Seafood, Sous Vide, and Desserts
Chef Thomas Keller’s third MasterClass is devoted to preparing seafood, sous vide cooking, and making classic desserts.
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[PIANO MUSIC] - Doesn't this make you smile? Desserts, growing up, for me, was always a reward. It was, always eat your peas and you can have dessert. Make sure you finish your meat, and you can have dessert. I'm really excited to be able to share with you some techniques that you really have to follow and pay attention to. Let's get started. [GENTLE MUSIC] We're going to make a chocolate pot de creme, which is a wonderful dessert. It's a small dessert but extremely rich. The quality of anything that we make is partially based on the ingredients that we use and then, of course, the technique or our skills to be able to produce it. We want to use dark chocolate for this. But you could use a milk chocolate. You could even use a dark milk chocolate. To begin, we're going to go ahead and prepare our garnish first . And that's just by taking on our chocolate, a typical vegetable peeler, and just shaving down into it into a bowl. You can see that. You go this way. You can go down. A bit down if you like. We get our little chocolate shavings there. To make our pot de creme, we're going to start with half-and-half, half cream, half milk. And the great thing about this pot de creme-- I say pot de creme or pot-- in French, it's actually pot de creme. We don't have to bake it. Traditionally, you would make a custard, put the custard in your little pot, little pot, and then bake that in bain-marie in the oven like a custard. In this case, we're going to go ahead and finish the cooking process in our sauce pot, flavor it with our chocolate. And we'll just be able to pour that in to our little pots, or little pots, and that will set for four hours And then it'll be ready to go. Adding our creme, our milk. Now, while that's coming up to a simmer, we're going to go ahead and whisk our egg yolks and our sugar. Our egg yolks. And our sugar. Now, you can see, we're not using a lot of sugar. We don't need to use a lot of sugar because we have our chocolate, which is sweetened with sugar. Now, there's two ways for us to tell when it's done. I'm going to show you one way with using a wooden spoon, where we just brush our finger across it. It creates a separation between the cream, and it drips down slowly. You can see the thickness and the viscosity of that. You can tell that it's finished then. Or you can use a thermometer. The thermometer we want to take up to 85 degrees Celsius. As chefs, professional chefs, we always use the metric system. So we're always using grams, Celsius, milliliters, liters, because it's much easier for us to divide and multiply. Ounces is a very difficult thing to work with for us. Cups are a very difficult thing to work for us. They don't really-- they're not as precise as measurement as with the metric system. Our weights and our volumes are much more precise in metrics. So we're always-- in our kitchens, we're always talking about grams and milliliters or liters or centiliters or Celsius. So we...
About the Instructor
In his third MasterClass, Chef Thomas Keller focuses on preparing fresh seafood like lobster and salmon, making classic desserts such as apple pie and lemon tart, and showing how sous vide cooking can be done at home to enhance flavor and texture. Whether you’re a beginning or advanced cook, you’ll learn the techniques and principles that will give you the understanding and skills to get the most delicious results.
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Thomas Keller
Chef Thomas Keller’s third MasterClass is devoted to preparing seafood, sous vide cooking, and making classic desserts.
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