Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Flan de mosca
For you Spanish-challenged readers, the secret ingredient will soon be obvious.
Adapted from the Traditional Flan recipe in Cuba Cocina. Preheat oven to 300F and ready your ingredients:
1/2 cup sugar, for caramelizing custard cups
2 cups whole milk
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 large eggs
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1. Come home from the grocery store and spend an hour vacuuming up the tiny flies which discovered your house a few months ago, spread the word to quadrillions of their friends, and returned to stay. Make three passes around the house, vacuuming at each window. Each pass is better than the previous, but no matter how many times you vacuum, there will always be flies.
2. Prepare caramel to line the custard cups. In a sauce pan, spread out the 1/2 cup of sugar, cover the pan, and cook undisturbed over medium heat. Do not stir until a good portion of the sugar melts and bubbles. You have just about enough time to go vacuum the main “trouble spot.” If you burn the caramel, start over.
3. Distribute the caramel evenly amongst your custard cups. Quickly cover the cups with a plastic trash bag. You really don’t want to chip flies out of your caramel, do you?
4. Add two cups of whole milk and 1/4 teaspoon salt to the same pan. Turn the range hood up to the max, hoping the updraft will keep flies out of your milk. Bring the milk just to the boil, stirring the whole time, and then set aside.
5. Beat 6 large eggs with 1/3 cup sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Note: I used local “organic” eggs, and wow, these are different. Much deeper orange than store-bought eggs, and they formed a meringue when I whipped them. Meringue — using whole eggs! Wild.
6. What’s that brown speck in the eggs? No. It couldn’t be. I just vacuumed up all the mother-effers.
Phew — it’s cuz they’re organic eggs. God only knows what those little brown bits are, but at least they’re not wings.
7. Shooing away inquisitive flies, add scalded milk to the eggs in a thin stream, beating the whole time. Then pour the mixture into the custard cups, distributing it as evenly as possible. Pour it through a sieve so those snotty parts don’t get into your flan.
8. The cups should be in casserole dishes so that you can make up a water bath. Get a four-cup measure, rinse out all the dead flies, and fill with warm tap water. Pour warm water into the casserole dish so that it reaches about two-thirds up the side of the cups.
9. Cook about 1 hour, or until the custard has firmly set.
10. While the custard cooks, vacuum more flies, do the dishes, come upstairs and give your wife hell for watching that Bobby Darin movie again. (Could be worse. Could be Titanic.)
11. Test the flan. A toothpick should come out clean. Remove from the oven and allow to cool to room temperature. Cover with foil because, well, you know. Flies.
12. When the flan de mosca has cooled, cover each custard cup with saran wrap and refrigerate until chilled. To serve, run a knife around the perimeter of each cup and invert onto separate dessert plates which have been cleaned of dead flies. Pour caramel sauce (which remains behind in the cups) over the flan. Pick out that odd little brown bit. It’s just some undissolved caramel — I’m sure of it.
I’ll post photos later. As for how it tastes, who knows? I’ll be damned if I eat any of that.
D.
You should know, Doug, that there’s no point beating the eggs to aerate them because when you sieve it, most of the air bubbles are broken anyway. I’m incredibly lazy, to the point that I heat the milk with the sugar, before whisking the milk into the eggs.
Because I’m not inclined to mess with pouring caramel unless I HAVE too (I’ve the incredible record of not having had a kitchen burn before in nearly 19 years of existence and would like to extend it), I measure out the sugar into the pan, and turn on the oven to about 200C to caramelize it in the pan.
Oh, I wasn’t intentionally trying to fluff them. It just kind of happened.
I like the caramel idea — I didn’t know the sugar would caramelize at such a low temp!
Hey, you could always serve your flan with bug juice…
I look at it as a way of incorporating more animal protein into a vegetarian diet.
I won’t be eating raisin bread either for a while…
200C isn’t a low temp, it’s the highest on my oven. Granted my oven is old, but it cooks everything just fine! One day, the whole world will be metric. No really, trust me. I’m scared too, but fear is not an excuse.
Ah — 200C! I was thinking F.
Of course, I’m often thinking F. F this, F that . . .
I once wrote a similar recipe for “Beef Stew for Stay at Home mothers.” The first three steps went something like this:
Place Baby in Bouncy seat. Wash hands.
Pour flour into shallow bowl. Add Salt and pepper.
Cut Beef into cubes. Realize baby needs a change.
Put beef back into refrigerator. Wash hands.
Change baby. Wash hands. Put baby back in bouncy seat.
Heat pot with oil on top of stove, take beef our of refrigerator and roll in flour. Brown in batches.
Answer doorbell.
Turn off stove, pick up baby and comfort it because you left the room to answer doorbell. Curse all mail carriers.
Put baby back in bouncy seat. Wash hands.
Etc.
It went on for pages, but my sister got a kick out of it. (The last instruction involved serving the stew to older children who refuse to eat it because “You forgot that I don’t like carrots.” Then trying to explain to husband why you’re tired, hungry, and cranky at the end of the day home with the children.)
I do love flan though. I do. (My kids hate it, so we never bother making it anymore. Sigh.)
Ah, if you do that, you do need to add a little bit of water to the sugar–it’s faster that way, I’ve found.
At 200F I don’t think you could boil water. LOL.