You Should Be Scorching Your Flan
I was walking around Tours, France, looking for an afternoon pick-me-up—as one does, on a leisurely country vacation—when I glimpsed a familiar toasted wedge behind a glass pastry case. It was one of my favorite desserts: flan pâtissier.
Even though it’s an iconic French dessert, flan pâtissier, or Paris flan, is dead simple. Pastry cream, flecked with vanilla bean, is baked until burnished in a buttery pastry crust. This flan has nothing to do with the trembling, just-set caramel custard of Mexican origin; Paris flan is set and sliceable (in fact, French children often eat a slice walking home from school as their afternoon goûter).
I’d like to lobby for it as your new favorite dessert. It’s impressive, feeds a crowd, strikes the right balance of decadent and light— and, since it’s a breeze to make ahead, it’s even a good recipe to have in your corner for a holiday meal. Plus, it works for any time of day (unlike some heavier numbers), so it's well suited for brunch or a get-together later in the day.
Whip out your food processor
Make quick work of your pastry crust with a food processor. You want to pulse the butter and flour together until it starts to look like coarse, slightly wet sand, a departure from the pea-sized guidance you may be used to hearing when making American pie dough. You’re essentially coating the flour in fat, which inhibits gluten production. This creates a lovely, tender base. You will need to chill your dough before rolling it out. Use our shortcut for bringing it together into a disk: dump your “sand” on to a piece of plastic wrap and pull the ends together, pressing everything together as you go.
Smack your dough
This is a tip I use when working with pastry or pie dough. After pulling your chilled dough disk out of the fridge, don’t attempt to roll it right away. Instead, use your rolling pin to smack it a few times to start flattening it into the right shape. This puts a little muscle into the process without you having to handle your dough too much and warm it up.
Speaking of keeping things cold: Instead of parbaking our pastry crust, which is typical of some iterations of flan pâtissier, we put the freezer to work in this recipe. Once your dough is rolled out, fitted to a springform pan and trimmed, stick the whole thing in the freezer for at least 30 minutes. Baking a cold tart shell is how you limit shrinkage while baking.
Chris’ formula for pastry cream
Chris Kimball offers his go-to formula for pastry cream on an episode of Milk Street TV. It’s 3 cups dairy (a combination of milk and heavy cream) to 1/2 cup sugar to 1/4 cup cornstarch for 3 eggs. We use the same ratio as the base for our pastry cream here. I find pastry cream delicious, but it’s taken me a long time to get the timing right so that I end up with a silky-smooth cream and not a... stodgy paste.
The more scientific solution is to keep a digital thermometer handy and pull your saucepan off the heat when the mixture is between 180 and 185 degrees Fahrenheit. Don’t let it get close to or past 200 degrees. Since pastry cream tends to thicken so quickly, I find it easier to rely on visual cues. Pull your pan off the stove at the very first sign of bubbling. In either case, make sure you keep whisking so the hottest liquid at the bottom circulates throughout the saucepan.
Form a thick skin
The shell, pastry cream and assembled tart are cooled on and off throughout prep, but the trip to the fridge after you pour the pastry cream into the tart shell might be the most important one. This brief chill helps the pastry cream form a skin. Incidentally, this is exactly what most pastry cream and pudding recipes are trying to avoid when they ask you to press plastic wrap right up against the custard before refrigerating. A skin here serves two purposes: 1) It prevents the pastry cream from puffing excessively high and out of the shell while baking and 2) it creates the barrier that gives the flan its signature scorched top.
Slice with two knives
When you pull the flan out of the oven, the center should still have a little jiggle to it. This will firm up after cooling down fully in the fridge. When time comes to slice and serve, have two knives on hand. Start cutting each slice with a serrated knife that will take on the crust and pierce the skin. Don’t go deeper than a half inch. Then, finish the slice with a regular knife so you don’t smash the just-set custard. Our recipe offers an optional apricot jam glaze to amp up the shine on the flan. I skip it; this lily needs no gilding.
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