Everyone snorts and snorts with excitement over the French dessert crème brûlée. Maybe you are enthusiastic about the Spanish creme brulee dessert or the Italian zabaglione? Like all things, cream desserts have their origins. In this case, it’s flan
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If you like eye creambut you are afraid of burning the caramelized crust and generally worry about cooking and baking custard in a double boiler, you should try making flan, one of the oldest custard desserts in Europe, if you can believe the historical evidence.
From a hearty omelette to a sophisticated dessert
If you have to give a nationality to this cream cake, Italians can rejoice because the flan is Roman! The word flan comes from the word “flado”, which in turn means thin cake and custard. By the way, the start of the dessert was salty, the flan was quite a hearty omelette with various toppings. The story is silent about who was the first to think about putting honey in it, but thanks and praise to him!
Flan is also recorded in the culinary treatise of the Roman gourmet and cook Apicius. This book can also be considered the oldest surviving cookbook to date. And the flan is there!
The barbarians who invaded Rome, devastating it, recognized the flan and its recipe as a good booty. He continued his life by traveling and getting various modifications throughout Europe and later to Mexico.
It must be said that what some dessert connoisseurs worry about today (“oh, that’s fat! I’ll have to take at least 20,000 steps after this dessert”) absolutely did not affect flan eaters several centuries ago. On the contrary: the fatter, the better! Food of the gods! Gives strength, gives well-being and improves power!
Flan around the world
Along with the discovery of America, flan has also traveled across the ocean, where it is particularly popular in South America (Mexico, Argentina) and is referred to as a tandem breakfast dish with strong and black coffee.
Mexicans are more than sure their flan is the most delicious. The highest quality vanilla and caramel are not spared in the flan.
In Mexico, a special “bain marie” container was created for the preparation of flans, where the flans are soaked in water and baked in the oven.
Is Mexican flan really the most delicious? I won’t judge, but the fact that a special pan – “bain marie” – was created in Mexico to make flan is in their favor! Hats off: this is the real passion for sweets! Have the Latvians created a special bowl for whipping mousse? Or a pot just for bread soup? Dear gourmets, there is potential here! Who is the first?
On the other hand, the French, proud of their crème brûlée, adore and also make flan, calling it “creme caramel”, while the Portuguese and the British put it in pastry dishes. In Portugal, the grandson of the flan is the cream pie “Cream pastries”.
A flan is a traveler. It has also found its way to Cuba, where it is called “cuba flan”, enriched with cinnamon and whipped cream. This ancient dessert has also established itself well in Asian countries and is able to adapt to various challenges: here it becomes coffee cream, here it can be prepared with condensed milk.
Small casseroles and large casseroles
Regardless of the paths this dessert takes, flan is basically a combination of sweet cream, sugar, and eggs, whipped together and poured into heat-resistant dishes, where cooked caramel is already waiting for it. After that, the dishes are squatted on the pan in a water bath and then you just have to wait for it to magically clot at a temperature of 150 degrees for about an hour and a half or two and turn into a heavenly dessert! There is no need to cook the flan at a higher temperature, of course, unless you want a sweet omelette, which is another thing, so be sure to turn up the degrees! After removing from the oven, the flan is allowed to cool and then follows the most important and complicated part: turn the cake upside down and pour it on the plate. It’s like unwrapping an Easter egg or turning over a tarte tatin, because there is always a certain percentage of risk that the caramel or cream will not behave as it should. If the whole batch is dropped, the caramel spills perfectly onto the curdled custard!
