Dessert custard.

Custard is a range of preparations based on milk and eggs, thickened with heat. It rhymes with mustard and bustard, which is probably coincidence. Most commonly, it refers to a dessert or dessert sauce, but custard bases are also used for quiches and other savoury foods. As a dessert, it is made from a combination of milk or cream, egg yolks, sugar, and flavourings such as vanilla. Sometimes flour, corn starch, or gelatin are also added. In French cookery, custard—called simply "crème" or more precisely "crème moulée"—is never thickened in this way: when starch is added, it is pastry cream crème pâtissière; when gelatin is added, it is crème anglaise collée. Birds Custard Birds Custard is the brand-name given to (and original version of) a cornflour-based powder that, when mixed with milk, thickens to form a custard-like sauce. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1656x1516, 310 KB) Summary Custard, in a bowl. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... A glass of cows milk. ... An egg is a body consisting of an ovum surrounded by layers of membranes and an outer casing of some type, which acts to nourish and protect a developing embryo. ... Mediterranean quiche In French cuisine, a quiche (IPA: ) is a baked dish that is made primarily of eggs and milk or cream in a pastry crust. ... A selection of desserts Dessert is a course that typically comes at the end of a meal, usually consisting of sweet food but sometimes of a strongly-flavored one, such as some cheeses. ... Cans of cream. ... An egg yolk surrounded by the egg white An egg yolk is the part of an egg which serves as the food source for the developing embryo inside. ... Magnification of grains of sugar, showing their monoclinic hemihedral crystalline structure. ... Flavouring (CwE) or flavoring (AmE) is a product which is added to food in order to change or augment its taste. ... Vanilla pods Vanilla is a flavouring derived from orchids in the genus Vanilla native to Mexico. ... For other uses, see Flour (disambiguation). ... Products made out of cornstarch Cornstarch is the starch of the maize grain, commonly known as corn. ... Gelatin (also gelatine, from French gélatine) is a translucent brittle solid substance, colorless or slightly yellow, nearly tasteless and considered foul smelling, extracted from the collagen inside animals connective tissue. ... Pastry cream, also called by its French name crème pâtissière, is a stirred custard, further thickened with starch. ...

Depending on how much egg or thickener is used, custard may vary in consistency from a thin pouring sauce (crème anglaise), to a thick blancmange like that used for vanilla slice or the pastry cream used to fill éclairs. For the computer protocol, see SAUCE. Or see source. ... Crème anglaise. ... Blancmange, pronounced (also known informally as shape), is a jelly dessert made of milk and/or cream, sugar, gelatin or cornstarch, and flavouring (usually almond). ... ... For the camera company, please see Eclair (camera). ...

Custard is usually cooked in a double boiler (bain-marie) or heated very gently on the stove in a saucepan, though custard can also be steamed, baked in the oven with or without a hot water bath, or even cooked in a pressure cooker. The trick to getting custard instead of sweetened eggs is to add heated milk to the eggs, not to add eggs directly into the pan on the stove. Cooking until it is set without cooking it so much that it curdles is a delicate operation, because only 5-10°F (3-5°C) separate the two. A water bath slows heat transfer and makes it easier to remove the custard from the oven before it curdles.^[1] A bain-marie (or water bath; plural bains-marie) is an apparatus used in cooking for applying gentle heat to food. ... Pressure cooking is a method of cooking things at high heat without boiling them. ...

Custard is an important part of dessert recipes from many countries, including the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Australia and Argentina.

Instant and ready-made 'custards' are also marketed, though they are not true custards if they are not thickened with egg. See Bird's Custard, for instance. In the United Kingdom, school custard is a common name for the 'custard' (usually made from cornflour) served for pudding at schools. Its poor quality and thick consistency are often the source of jokes. Pink school custard is made by combining Angel Delight (strawberry) with custard mix, generally starch based packet custard. ^{[citation needed]} Birds Custard Birds Custard is the brand-name given to (and original version of) a cornflour-based powder that, when mixed with milk, thickens to form a custard-like sauce. ...

Savoury custards

Not all custards are sweet. A Quiche is a savoury custard tart. Some kinds of timbale or vegetable loaf are made of a custard base mixed with chopped savoury ingredients. Custard royale is a thick custard cut into decorative shapes and used to garnish soup or broth. Chawanmushi is a Japanese savory custard, cooked and served in a small bowl or on a saucer. Mediterranean quiche In French cuisine, a quiche (IPA: ) is a baked dish that is made primarily of eggs and milk or cream in a pastry crust. ... Timbale may refer to one of the following Timbal, a kind of a kettledrum (see timbales) Timbale, a kind of dish of various ingredients baked in a round mold, also called timbale. This is a disambiguation page—a list of articles associated with the same title. ... Soup is usually a savoury liquid food that is made by combining ingredients, such as meat, vegetables and beans in stock or hot water, until the flavor is extracted, forming a broth. ... Broth is a liquid in which bones, meat, fish, cereal grains, or vegetables have been simmered and strained out. ... Chawanmushi is an egg custard dish found in Japan that uses the seeds of Ginkgo. ...

Uses

Recipes involving sweet custard are listed in the custard dessert category, and include:

Bavarian cream or Crème bavaroise is a classical dessert named after Bavaria, Germany. ... Crème brûlée Crème brûlée (French for burnt cream; IPA: in English, in French) is a dessert consisting of a rich custard base topped with a layer of hard caramel, created by burning sugar under a grill or other intense heat source. ... Homemade flan, Florida style Crème caramel, flan, or caramel custard is a kind of rich custard dessert with a layer of soft caramel on top, as opposed to crème brûlée, which is custard with a hard caramel top. ... Egg Tarts are a kind of pastry that is popular in Hong Kong, Macau, surrounding areas in southern China and overseas Chinese communities. ... Pastel de Nata or Pastel de Belém is a small cream tart found throughout Portugals pastry shops or cafés. ... Trifle is a British dessert dish made from a mixture of thick custard, fruit, sponge cake, jelly/jello and whipped cream. ... An egg tart with puff pastry crust Egg tart is a kind of pastry that is popular in Hong Kong, Macau and surrounding areas in southern China. ... Flan with Dulce de leche and milk cream In cooking, crème caramel or flan is a kind of custard dessert with a layer of soft caramel on top. ... Chocolate frozen custard Frozen custard is a type of cold dessert similar to ice cream, made with eggs in addition to cream and sugar. ... Galaktoboureko (Greek: Γαλακτομπούρεκο) is a Greek dessert made with phyllo dough that is stuffed with lemon custard, and baked with a clear syrup. ... Bled, a popular tourist destination in northwestern Slovenia, is famous for its kremna rezina, a cake made of vanilla and custard, which was invented at the Park Hotel in 1953. ... Panna cotta in blackberry sauce Panna cotta in strawberry sauce Panna cotta is an Italian desert made by simmering together some cream, milk and sugar, mixing this with gelatin, before letting it cool until set. ... Pumpkin pie Wikibooks Cookbook has an article on Pumpkin pie Pumpkin pie is a traditional North American dessert usually made in the late fall and early winter, especially for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. ... ... VLA can be used, as an acronym, for Very Large Array - a telescope configuration in astronomy. ... Zabaglione is an Italian dessert made with egg yolks, sugar, a sweet liquor (usually Marsala wine), and sometimes cream or whole eggs. ... This article is about the baked good, for other uses see Pie (disambiguation). ...

Physical properties

Cooked (set) custard is a weak gel which is viscous and thixotropic; while it does become easier to stir the more it is manipulated, it does not, unlike many other thixotropic liquids, recover its lost viscosity over time.^[2] In optical filters and theatrical lighting a color gel is a transparent or translucent colored panel used to change the color of transmitted light. ... Thixotropy is the property of some non-newtonian pseudoplastic fluids to show a time dependant change in viscosity; the longer the fluid undergoes shear, the lower its viscosity. ...

A suspension of uncooked imitation custard powder (actually, any starch will do) mixed with water in the right proportions has the opposite rheological property: it is negative thixotropic, or dilatant, which is to say that it becomes more viscous when under pressure. It is often used in science demonstrations of non-Newtonian liquids: see Oobleck. The British popular-science program Brainiac: Science Abuse demonstrated dilatancy dramatically by filling a swimming pool with this mixture and having presenter Jon Tickle walk across it; this was misleadingly called "walking on custard". It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Mixture. ... Starch (CAS# 9005-25-8) is a complex carbohydrate which is insoluble in water; it is used by plants as a way to store excess glucose. ... Rheology is the study of the deformation and flow of matter under the influence of an applied stress. ... A dilatant material is one in which viscosity increases with the rate of shear (also termed Shear thickening). ... Viscosity is a measure of the resistance of a fluid to deform under shear stress. ... A non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid in which the viscosity changes with the applied strain rate. ... Oobleck was originally popularized as a fictional form of green precipitation described by Dr. Seuss in Bartholomew and the Oobleck. ... Brainiac: Science Abuse is a television programme showing in the UK on Sky One (and repeated on Sky Mix). ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

References

1. ^ Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking, 1984, ISBN 0-684-18132-0, p. 71
2. ^ Karla Longrée, Sharie Beaver, Paul Buck, Joseph E. Nowrey, "Viscous Behavior of Custard Systems", Journal of agricultural and food chemistry 14:6:653 (1966)[1]

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Custard